Medical History
by nimmieamee
Summary: The Winter Soldier tries to cure himself. It goes about as well as you would expect.
1. Chapter 1

The Winter Soldier hit on a diagnosis.

It happened on East Capitol Street. This is, predictably, that minor artery tucked to the east of the Capitol Building.

East Capitol Street is idyllic old America as it never was for ten or eleven blocks. It is urban and yet small-town, with the road for the cars paved beautifully but the pavement for the people charmingly cracked in places. The street is bordered by townhouses; some seem a relic of a heroic colonial era, with clapboard fronts and beautifully overgrown front gardens, while others are red brick Victorian with ornate black iron stairs leading to frosted glass and gleaming wood double doors. Inside, testaments to Loews and the Home Depot and other such powerful economic temples: polished floors just installed, crown moldings just refurbished, and large shining refrigerators, just purchased. Outside, paint peels in places, pretty weeds grow up through the street, ancient trees offer shade, and there is one antique bench in front of the diner, the diner transplanted from a rustic America that might have existed five decades ago.

East Capitol Street is only modern on the inside. Where it counts, it is old-fashioned and perfect. All the way from the Capitol down to a sunny patch of green dedicated to Abraham Lincoln, greatest president, it presents a unique America: the past cherry-picked to reflect Our National Best.

At the time of the diagnosis, the brick house covered over with ivy and blue paint was Dr. Stern's. The doctor was seeing a patient.

The consultation began in silence. The patient could not summon up words of his own. It was not even that the words were trapped inside him. There simply weren't any, not without prompting, not without orders or demands. The silence stretched all around them, mingled with the homey golden glow of East Capitol Street in late afternoon. The patient accepted it, for a time, until the ticking of a clock on the wall reminded him that there was such a thing as time. The whole world is not East Capitol Street, golden and changeless, existing outside the boundaries of national history. Time exists. It ticks on. And this filled the patient with something he couldn't name and didn't want to touch or examine too closely. Dread. Without even considering why, he opened his mouth. Instinctively, as though this could bandage over the awful realization that he had somehow let seconds and minutes bleed away, he spoke.

"I thought you would know," the patient said, halting, wondering, "How to put—"  
Here he gestured at his mind. His hand came up almost of it's own accord, as though it were on invisible marionette strings. "—it all back. Or—or take it out."

It seemed a herculean effort to say this much at all. But this was common, for a session. So many patients, busy and important, with glossy hair and glossier briefcases, suffer similarly. Used to holding their emotions in check in the face of demanding underlings, sinister senators, and even the Capitol police disrupting their commute, they arrive at Dr. Stern's office and find it so hard to drop the mask. How can they tell this man their secret desires, their ancient regrets? Suddenly, they can't even muster up the strength to explain how very charming they find East Capitol Street, how the Capitol Building (just moments away) enflames patriotic ardor they've long believed sacrificed to a more cynical age. And they were just saying thatto their assistants this morning.

But this patient was slightly different. His session was not typical.

Firstly, Dr. Stern did not advertise as a specialist in putting anything back. Only in helping people take things out: compulsions, nebulous voices, uncharitable urges. That the patient began with put it all back was worth jotting down in an old-fashioned psychiatric notebook, perhaps as the patient reclined, feverishly truthful, on a divan.

Second odd thing: no notebooks, no divan. These were not located here, in Dr. Stern's home. They were work tools. They were in his office several streets away, where Massachusetts Avenue met a patch of green dedicated to Washington, also the greatest president.

Third: it was Monday. Dr. Stern did not work Mondays.

Fourth: Dr. Stern was tied up in the basement, with his arms and legs broken, and a dishrag in his mouth.

He could hardly be expected to provide sterling counseling in this fashion. And his patient's initial request –put it back –had been very strange. His patient was now feeling small stirrings of a long-dormant emotion: embarrassment.

The embarrassment was terrifying.

But he did not hold it against Dr. Stern, this fear.

Why had he even said it?

Put it back.

No, if anything, he needed the other stuff put back. The haze and pain, then the clarity. A simple cycle. An empty, whistling, lack of impulse. The blankness - was it contentment? No. Never. This he knew now. It was simply nothing. But now there was so much something, and he could not be sure what he would do next. His mind was firing off at random. It had stalled his hand; he hadn't killed Dr. Stern at the first sign of trouble.

He was living horribly, uncertainly right now.

Select medical textbooks, retrieved from upstairs and not even the good ones (those were in the office), suggested things that had no relevance. Symptoms flashed into his mind, he processed them with too much ease, discarded most. To demand a return to normal would be fruitless. His impulse was still to shout for it. Childishly, scared and confused. But it had been a week and some facts had penetrated the fog of his brain, lodged there. He turned them over in his mind fearfully. SHIELD - that is to say, certain people, formless voices, commands - and HYDRA - much the same: two names for the same thing - were both exposed. Possibly dismantled. And nothing could build up what had been toppled. He had done the toppling for a very long time, so this was something he simply knew in his bones. Nothing could fix the outside world, kicked off its axis by one stubborn familiar face (with some backup). The cure would have to be internal. A dust-covered computer manual, selected at random from the shelf, called this a system restore.

His system was disintegrating fast. It needed a restore. But to what point?

And a second question, bobbing up slimy and unfamiliar from a murk he hadn't even known his mind possessed, like a body to be fished from a river: if he restored to an earlier point, would there even be much left to restore to?

Disturbing. Not that there might not be anything. He prodded that idea tentatively. Perhaps he was nothing. He was a lack. He was no self. He could attach no emotional value, positive or negative, to such an outcome. This was a relief.

But the questions themselves were not a relief. It was not pleasant to know that he was suddenly supplying his own questions, suddenly supplying orders and ideas for himself. He did not understand it. He could not explain the condition to Dr. Stern; he did not have the words. He could never have said that he suspected some great rusty machine in his hindbrain had come awake all of a sudden, to correct for the terrifying freedom that appeared when no orders were forthcoming.

But this was exactly what it felt like.

Terrifying. Why was the freedom even terrifying? Why were these new impulses and pictures in his brain terrifying?

Nothing had been terrifying for a long time. Nothing had been anything for a long time. There was no space in his brain; it was crammed full of information, frantic impulse, pockets of sudden feeling, dazed and rubbed raw. These were the symptoms of his condition. All this something. But he could not trace it back to the source, as indeed many patients cannot.

The basement gave him no answers. It was not really a basement. He had gone to ground in the real basement, waiting for Dr. Stern to come home, and the real basement was twenty square feet of paint cans and dun brick and hard earth and a whirring, inhuman laundry machine, and it had been comforting. But homes on East Capitol Street did not just have mere brick basements; instead, they also had airy ground floors, cordoned off and advertised as basement apartments, lauded for their access to green patches full of flowers and cheerful red wood garages and winding, picturesque alleys, perfectly clean and cobbled. This was where they were now, in the garden apartment. Currently not-rented by Dr. Stern's daughter, a bubbly brunette considering grad school. Aside from old computer manuals, she had pamphlets, bits of paper, receipts tossed carelessly on the table, textbooks, novels, so much. The patient could not fully process these things, not the lumpy green couch, not the windowbox in the rear room bursting with flowers. Overwhelmed, he only touched some of them, furtively, with an odd little terrified smile he didn't even know he was capable of.

Dr. Stern was shouting things through his gag, muffled and nearly soundless. This his patient ignored, after a reflexive mental sweep that confirmed Dr. Stern was too securely tied to go anywhere.

There was a book on the nightstand in the bedroom. It was a history, and it told him about wars and many men, about a smattering of women, and some persons who were not American, but mostly Americans. He did not find the American he was looking for. He hadn't realized he was looking for anyone, and became annoyed with himself.

He flipped to another book. Plagues – not relevant to him, he knew they could not hurt him. Another: massacres and soldiers gone wrong, lies and My Lais. Understandable, perfectly easy to process. Not relevant. Another. Prisons – here they came closer. He had lived prisons. Prisons made sense. Another. Torture.

Ah. Here they were. Now he came close. Torture machines. Ancient ones, not new ones. Complete with whirring needles and clacking knives, poisons and toxins and fear gas. Breaking men and women down, assaulting them. Forcing them to escape their own brains. The book did not say this, but the patient imagined they had to flee themselves, they would have to hide somewhere for a time, whirl down a dendritic highway and into their own arteries and become secret ghosts there. And then they would die in the hands of the torture machines, with the best parts of them hidden away beneath the skin, concealed guerilla fighters in a war they were sure to lose.

This, he felt, was what had happened to him. Modern methods of torture he of course glossed over. They seemed so everyday and ordinary; how could he, an American (he was; he thought) on East Capitol Street, be affected by the thought of waterboarding? Even the people who had never seen it happen were not very affected by it. No. It was methods long-gone that seized his imagination, that he formed into a diagnosis. Relics from antiquity, the world wars, and the wars people mostly forgot: Iron Maidens. Heretics' Forks. Sicilian Bulls. Poison gases. Napalm sticking to a person, causing severe burns when set aflame.

Old-fashioned attacks. They made a battleground of the body, creeping in beneath the skin. Terrifying names, for terrifying phenomena. Like _the_ _Winter Soldier_.

There were several hundred pages left in the book, but the patient did not reach them. He heard the sound of a key in the lock upstairs, and soundlessly positioned himself for retreat.

Dr. Stern had by now managed to shake off part of his gag - unusual, poor execution of his not-mission, why hadn't he just killed him? - and gave a shout, and a man in a black suit was pounding down the stairs.

The patient shoved the gag back into Dr. Stern's mouth with no care for the degree of force, then secured it, almost punishingly. There was now a gun trained on him, but he hardly minded. Instinctively, quickly, he knocked it out of the suited man's hands. Then he snapped his neck without thinking about it. Right there, on East Capitol Street, the jewel of the United States.

Probably not the first murder to ever take place there.

The man he'd killed, though he did not know it, had been employed by Dr. Stern's disgraced Senator father. If he had bothered to look more closely at all those files released to the public (instead of zeroing in, in an uncharacteristic low-level panic, on the first mention of a doctor), he would have seen this person's name written between the lines, a small and unnamed cell in a greater body called HYDRA. But it wouldn't have meant anything to him just then, or maybe it would have suddenly meant too much. Maybe those rusted parts of him would have screamed themselves awake too quickly, overwhelmed him completely.

It was happening already. It scared him. He wanted to make it stop, this degenerative slide into so much feeling. He was losing his cherished blankness, his nothing-ness, his prior state, his restore point. It was a gradual thing. But it was also a kind of assault.

This was the diagnosis. A summation of his current condition. He was under attack. He was the victim of a complex torture, a battle waged on his mind. These new impulses and thoughts and memories hit him, and they were so incredible that they seemed to cause pain.

It is curious that he made these associations. He was not often equipped to draw connections like this, fanciful and human connections, and after he settled on the thought it was mostly back to the brain murk for him, and anyway, he was wrong. He was not a torture victim anymore. He was the iron maiden, the torture cabinet. He was a walking instrument of fear. Once there had been a kind of soul inside him, long believed dead, who ought to be dead. Bucky Barnes, with a birthdate and deathdate attached. Glossy pictures in a museum, a tragic display for all the world to see. The all-American martyr as he never had been. Beautifully human, laughing in black-and-white, essential facts arrayed on exhibit until next month, not far from East Capitol Street. Named for one of our worst presidents.

Bucky Barnes had been routed from the patient's mind. Maybe even killed. But now the patient would slowly learn that there were more pages left in the book. Horrible, panicky, living feelings flooded through him. No reason to them, no thought, only rage and fear alternating with wonder, with hesitant discovery. Impulses and reactions that hit him like toxins injected into the blood.

Welded to the torture machine that encased him, Bucky Barnes was waking up.

* * *

Thanks to dayadhavam, who gave me some feedback on this when I posted it to my tumblr.


	2. Chapter 2

He really was part machine. The arm part. His arm was shining, efficient, beautiful. There were seventeen trackers in it. He didn't really understand that they were there. He knew. Knowing was not the same as understanding. The information was simply inside him, sitting there, something he could trust in, like the sun coming up after the night.

So when they found him, he was not immediately surprised.

He was on the bus. Some of the buses here looked like toy creations. They were red with grey-silver and mustard yellow in places, and very wide, and the back door on them popped open automatically to let people out at the touch of a button. He had slipped in that way after the people had trooped out. It was his autopilot: seeing the opportunity and seizing it, without any thought required. This was also how he had acquired new clothes. A hat, a jacket. This was all the result of the sensible motor inside him he had always trusted in, but had never once consciously considered. Hadn't even known existed. Was only beginning to be vaguely aware of. It performed all necessary survival operations. It would have done this even if he hadn't been under attack, besieged by this strange new sense of being present.

Awake. Alive.

Two things concerned him:

1. This assault. Life. Bucky Barnes coursing through his bloodstream. Reaching his mind and poisoning it, dulling and enflaming him all at once, though he wouldn't have phrased the phenomenon in this way. But that was exactly what it felt like. It left him uncertain, nauseous. Following the trail of Steven G. Rogers, American hero, man on the bridge, $12.00 special exhibit fee, he'd hit on this name: Bucky Barnes. A face he could only recognize as his own very very distantly. As though someone else entirely were doing the recognizing.

2. The man himself. Steve Rogers. The catalyst for all of this.

If Bucky Barnes was the poison now whirring through his veins, the torture venom injected into him like some kind of serum, turning him helpless, as helpless as a screaming man strapped to a table; no, more helpless, because that was a familiar experience, at least…

Then Steve Rogers had been the needle. The first uncomfortable pinprick. The prelude to the assault.

So why did he mean anything at all? Why was he important? Why did he seem to have special phrases – 'friend', 'Bucky' – codes to activate something inside him?

Why hadn't he left Steve Rogers to die?

Why did the very thought almost halt his breathing?

He turned some of this over in his head, the parts he could grasp, as he sat on the bus. There was a small, dark-skinned boy sitting next to him, and the boy's hands were clasped politely in front of him, and he sat on his mother's lap very calmly. The mother, in an updo and pencil skirt, seemed the type to accept no less, though how the Winter Soldier knew this he really could not tell.

He copied the pose. One of his hands was a little like the boy's. Like everyone's. His other hand was the iron maiden hand. The torturing hand. The hand with the trackers in it. It was not like anyone else's, and in the museum bathroom he'd realized this for the first time. He'd always known it. But he hadn't really understood it. And, while locked in the stall, alone, hit by an onslaught of confusion, trying to contain himself, he had peered out through a crack and seen other people washing their hands. Rhythmically, soothingly. Turning the taps. Acquiring soap. Rub. First the front, then the back. It had hit him that he couldn't do this with his hands. This caused inexplicable sorrow. He was attacked by some images: a forest, damp and cold, and military green clothes, and two normal hands, and a rifle in one of them, and they were filthy, and his gloves had ripped, and then there were more images - the same hands in smart black gloves, tucked into smart pockets, looking pristine and perfect. The same pair of hands, but two conflicting views. First (he did not know how he knew this came first; he simply knew it) smart and clean, with white fingers and trimmed nails, adjusting the bouquet of flowers over the grave, Sarah Kathleen Rogers, then clasping a skinny shoulder. Second, the hands became grimy with oil and dirt and blood, and they ripped aside the clothes of a nameless corpse to find something important, something necessary, and then they hefted the rifle; and then, with a dying man's sweat and dirt beneath the fingernails, they collected their reward and returned it to—

Steve Rogers.

But now they were not the same hands; his metal one could not ever get really dirty, and if it did, it only needed some polishing, and some repair. He knew this. He flexed the metal fingers. The little boy stared at him. He obediently stopped flexing and went back to clasping his hands. The little boy still stared.

They would be coming for the arm. And for him – whatever he was now – because he was attached to the arm, and he was an asset, and because they could repair him.

The trouble was: he did not want to go to them.

He'd fight it. He wouldn't go back. The rush of Bucky Barnes in his veins. That was what was doing it. The torture Steve Rogers had initiated, while underneath him, face bruised and bloody, or else while calling out his name, his self-destruct sequence, or else while tall and expectant, taking and taking from his bloody hands, or else just a pair of skinny shoulders, refusing to take anything at all.

HYDRA could fix him. Undo what Steve Rogers had begun. Maybe. Possibly.

But this Bucky Barnes virus twisted him into stupidity. He knew it was stupid. But he'd pulled his attacker from the water instead of pushing him deeper, drowning his assailant. And now he didn't want to go back.

He should go back.

The little boy was still looking at him. He wondered what the kid wanted. He wondered how to give it to him. They had no way of communicating. The kid was small and normal and perfect. But the Soldier was poisoned. There could be no common ground. If the child had started issuing commands and orders, held out a mouth guard, smacked him, he might have understood. They would have a working language. But children did not do that. Even he knew children did not do that.

He realized that he liked this.

He smiled at the child. The child looked terrified. He realized that he was smiling, and stopped. The child had his head buried in his mother's arm. She was on the phone. She didn't notice. The child lifted his head, looked at him with eyes that made no sense. There was no real expression in them, not even fright, not even calculation. They did not issue commands.

It was his turn to be terrified. He looked away very suddenly.

He was breathing very hard, like something in him was broken. But not the metal parts, not the untouchable body, the network of power and instincts HYDRA had so appreciated. That was still functioning. It saw the shadows that crept over the windows, detected the slight thump on the roof of the bus, noted the vans pulling up on either side.

The little boy was the only little boy on the bus. There were also two teenage girls, an elderly man, a young woman with a battered paperback, a hunched and ragged figure of indeterminate gender in the back, three men in suits, the boy's mother, the heavyset and cheerful driver. He had known this since he'd gotten on the bus; without really knowing it, he'd tracked the movements and patterns of who had come on and off. Noticed the spilled soda under the seat across the way, the wet trail of it across the floor. Understood that no one here was armed and that they lived in a world of very clean hands, smart clothes, and skinny shoulders.

The bus stopped. One of the suited men rose and left through the door directly in front of them. There was a park just outside. Children played, exactly fifteen of them. The little boy looked at them. He did not belong on the bus with the shadows crouched low on its roof and the vans circling it. He belonged outside. Away from the shadow.

Away from HYDRA.

The Soldier picked him up and dropped him outside before the door closed. The child's mother screamed. It took a moment for everyone else on the bus to realize what had happened. The driver had pulled away from the curb. The traffic kept him from going very far, but there was an opening and he took it. The vans on either side stayed behind, blocked by traffic.

With the little boy. And the children.

Stupid. Stupid.

He looked down at his hands. A thought floated by. It was:

Taking all the stupid with you.

The thought scared him, because he had no idea where it came from. It was as if another person had said it, only he suspected it couldn't be another person. It had to be more of the attack inside him. Telling him he hadn't thought this through.

More people were noticing. One of the suited men had jumped in front of him, was yelling. The girls had run to alert the driver. The young woman had put her paperback down and was comforting the mother. Everyone was speaking, screaming; he couldn't quite grasp why or exactly what they were saying.

There was still a shadow on the bus.

He reached beyond the shouting mother and broke the window. Her screams of anger became screams of fright. He pushed her aside. She fell into the young woman. The men with the suits were reaching for them. The homeless person had staggered up and was trying to apprehend him. The bus driver had stopped the vehicle, right in the middle of the street, and was shouting. Cars swerved around them. People screamed.

He climbed out of the window, hoisted himself up. A Steyr AUG A3 was leveled at him. It was comforting, easy. It provoked no emotions. His metal arm crushed the muzzle, then snatched the barrel, then pulled. That this was frankly insane and ought to have been impossible did not occur to him. He did feel a strange, small frisson of satisfaction. He did not have time to think about it or to let it scare him. He was too busy beating the shadow down with its own gun. It really only took a moment.

He had his own guns, not to mention a length of garrote wire and six knives and everything necessary to assemble and fire a modified MGL. He had always been as impersonal about the kill as possible, but this did not preclude the diversity of his talents. He was, after all, a metal man, an instrument of fear.

But this shadow he killed in a very human way. He did not know why; it was just necessary. The hard-faced men in suits, with (false, he knew) badges were pouring out of the vans, the people around them were running away, hiding, snapping photographs. It overwhelmed him. He was not supposed to notice it. He was not supposed to be a participant in the world; only a tool, and a tool does not notice an audience any more than it has to. But the little boy had run up to the bus, the mother was screaming, and people were trying to reach him.

It made something inside the him flare up and nearly overpower him. The attack on the Winter Soldier reached a zenith, like it had with the good Captain before he'd dropped into the water.

He was no longer thinking. Only reacting. Only terrified, and terrifying,

He knew MCMAP. He knew lots of things, but MCMAP came naturally to him, to all of him, even the warring bits of him. It was American; so was he, though he didn't know it. It was also deadly, in the right hands. His were very much the right hands.

Swiftly, brutally, precisely, the HYDRA agent died.

It was a much kinder death than the Winter Soldier could have given him. He could have given him a thousand more visceral deaths. But he was tangled up inside, and on camera outside, and it was time to make his escape, and the little boy was looking at him.

He wondered, horribly afraid for the first time in some time, if he had killed any children. He really could not say if he had. But it didn't feel wrong. And that did feel wrong. And that scared him.

He made his escape.

But he was all over the news. He'd once been called a ghost. This was not correct. He was no ghost; he was a very real terror.

No, he was neither. He was part robot. That was what the little boy said when the police – the real police and the fake ones – questioned him. The little boy drew it out on a piece of paper. The man was part robot because he was part metal. His bones were probably vibranium. His hands were made of melted down guns. His skull was all steel underneath his shadowy eyes, and only those eyes were real, and they were like a sick person's eyes. Robots were not supposed to get sick, but this one was. This one was infected.


	3. Chapter 3

Far from East Capitol Street (but not too far), Steve hit on a problem.

He was in Takoma Park. Only half as picturesque as East Capitol Street, though Steve didn't know that. He had never been to East Capitol Street. He'd only driven near it a few times, without ever once discovering that it existed. And so he found Takoma Park perfectly nice, and didn't understand that it was deficient by comparison.

Where East Capitol Street was central, by the city's heart, Takoma Park was merely not too inconvenient. Where East Capitol Street had red brick and antique ornamental ironwork, Takoma Park had the occasional whitewashed porch, Victorian houses that existed only for Yearly Tours, and pits for new construction. Where East Capitol Street had a decided stylish nostalgia, Takoma Park had only confused attempts at character.

Modern condos with their very own modern avenues, reproduced somewhat near to one side of the metro stop. Near the other side, a street of pleasant shops, with clothes and curios and a Subway. Agreeable benches set out near a church and some greenery and a CVS. Here and there an old house of the kind that might be found anywhere in the nation, with a wide old porch, sometimes painted daring colors (blue, or yellow), but often not. And here and there pockets of steel-boned homes making a half-hearted attempt to be wood framed and brick lined and striking, as striking as the ones on East Capitol Street, by camouflaging themselves with columns, or green shutters, or aluminum siding.

Sam lived a modern aluminum siding house.

Sam's home was like a television home. It was all in soothing, neutral sitcom tones: the walls were blue or beige or white or green or a lighter green. The banisters and cabinets were beige wood, the beigest of all woods, something sold in vast quantities expressly to calm the eye and achieve perfect, modern-home harmony. The counters were of an inoffensive and very marketable marble. The refrigerator sat tucked into the kitchen, large and black and solid and unadorned, as though it didn't wish to offend a soul. Microwave, washer, dryer, and dishwasher were all present and accounted for. They were fairly new, and, blessedly, they were a real estate agent's dream: they evinced no personality whatsoever and came with no unpleasant history. Like the refrigerator, they added not a hint of character to the place, and if a home invader had broken in through one of the windows, they would have poked around among all these featureless appliances and all the soothing walls and the beige wood, and would have concluded that possibly no one lived here at all, or maybe it was a very uncreative film set.

Because Sam didn't fill his house with false nostalgia, or curious hidden details, or American history, or the new masquerading as the old.

Sam filled it with sound.

In private, even more than in public, Sam was a talker. He corrected the radio while he cooked things. And hit on epiphanies while he showered. And composed the day's schedule while he tied his sneakers. He also had a remarkably pleasant hum, and an even better singing voice. And close to 34,000 songs on his itunes, and he played music very often, and he had an intricate ranking system for it, and he knew facts and figures about it – knew a lot of history, actually, even if he didn't throw up on the walls or carve it into the lintels – and when he was home he could relay all this in a manner both comforting and passionate. He would fill up the space with his voice. He would chop onions and peppers and cucumbers and the chop chop would obtain a kind of independent life, a beat all its own. He could coax agreeable whirs and personable beeps from the comatose appliances. With Sam inside the house, its beige devices would seem to thrum and come alive.

Steve lived there now, and had for less than a month, and already he liked it there.

It seemed to him that he had approached Sam rather inconspicuously. This was untrue, but Steve didn't have a good frame of reference for these things. And, compared to the not-nurse Steve had outright asked for a cup of coffee, he had been slightly more circumspect with Sam. Steve thought. For him. He was very given to directness. But the modern world wasn't always as modern as he would have liked, in certain respects, and so it had seemed to him that he needed to approach Sam more carefully.

He'd only talked to him. Smiled. Gone to visit him at his job. Relied on him in a pinch. Moved in because he'd torpedoed his employers, and his employers were apparently former Nazi rogue scientists who'd set up his first apartment and who therefore knew where he lived and probably had copies of the keys.

And he'd said, very casually over breakfast one morning, "You know, Natasha's always trying to set me up. Goes in for only women, though. I should tell her I like both."

And Sam had raised an eyebrow, chop chopped more peppers for the omelette, and said, "Dude, I think she knows. Probably just waiting for you to tell her directly. You're not shy about it, Steve."

Sam's computer was blasting blues-rock-soul: Baby Huey and the Babysitters, who had never recorded a single album but who lived on, preserved in a Curtis Mayfield-produced posthumous LP and in Sam's speakers. His dishwasher was comfortingly rattling out emotional support. The dryer in the hall whirred in a forthright way, offering mechanical advice Steve couldn't quite decipher.

"Do you think," Steve said bravely, unconvincingly, as indirect as he got, "That I should tone it down?"

Sam smiled.

"I didn't say that," he said.

And Steve was in the process of looking for a new place anyway. Because, as mentioned, former Nazi rogue science employers.

So.

For the time being, Steve's shield – rescued from the Potomac by Agent Hill – took up residence in the sitcom apartment. It was a gaudy prop designed to inject some life into the place when Sam wasn't around to do it. And Steve's sneakers lined up next to Sam's sneakers. And essential articles of clothing filled out the beige wood dresser. And a second toothbrush appeared one night, and Sam saw it sitting forlornly on the sink and procured a bright blue cup for it somehow.

Bucky's file took its place on the table, all spread out in pieces, with pen and paper notes added here and there, like they used to do in the old days, and when Steve reached the middle he found a helping hand from a friend. Some contacts for him. People on the ground who could get him the news more quickly than the radio could, who could scout for him, who could go where he couldn't. People he didn't really know. Through them, the process of looking for Bucky became streamlined. It was all done on encrypted and secret technology no government agency could track, with robotic efficiency from everyone. It was, in fact, a little like SHIELD had been.

Only every name came with some strange particular attached.

Troy Barnes - no one would ever recruit him. He's in air conditioning repair. Has a boyfriend, but they both seem like the open type.  
Brandon Calvo - refused to launch the Helicarriers. Likes LARPing. Not your style, but thought I'd throw it in.  
Sharon Carter - faced down Rumlow. Hates being sick. Remains cute.

And so on.

A Natasha dating game, taking Steve's proclivities into account after all. A sliver of friendship hidden away inside the file's horror tale of efficiency. Also: a handy list of people who had never once been loyal to HYDRA. People who'd made the jump to FBI, to Intelligence and Analysis, even to the local police force (which was a jump, but when your average American suspected you were HYDRA, Steve thought with a small pang, then a job was a job). They were all listed for their value as information centers, but then converted back to human by Natasha's sharp scrawl. This network uncovered a man in a museum, and a shadow striding along South of the Capitol. They spoke to Steve in low, assuring tones on the other end of phone lines: he learned their voices without ever seeing their faces. One or two even asked him, boldly and kindly, if he had a new place to live, and was he doing alright, and did he see what that late-night comedian had said about him.

Brandon Calvo, who was now working on the upgrade of DC-area traffic cameras, even sent him a brief message.

Hey Cap. This is gonna hit the internet/news soon. Thought you should see it before it did.

And then a video, indeed a few minutes before it hit the news or the internet. Bucky. On top of a bus.

In the next room, Sam was talking to one of his friends on the phone, laughing at something so brightly that the house itself seemed to respond in kind, open up and become brighter in turn. The icemaker in the fridge was clinking out a slow, calming few beats. The microwave had lit up and the plate inside begun a humming spin. There was an internet radio playlist, not too obscure this time, playing in the living room. Normal news radio was on in the bedroom. The house was alive and Steve sat at the table and felt very suddenly like he was the least alive thing there. Sam was living. The appliances had obtained a kind of warmth. But Steve was frozen through, like his organs were becoming cold tin and steel, mechanical appliances in and of themselves.

Bucky.

He took a breath. The first order of business, he told himself distantly, was to make sure that Bucky hurt as few people as possible. Bucky—the Soldier… He was good at hurting. He was a danger to the public. Steve went through the network again. Troy Barnes, at Police Central, confirmed that a Do Not Approach warning was imminent. Chloe Turner, working in another department, told Steve he'd have news of any endangered civilians as soon as they did. And that the man on top of the bus, the dead man, was probably not a harmless DC resident. That kind of weaponry? He was HYDRA. He had to be.

It should have been some small comfort, discovering that Bucky was brutalizing HYDRA instead of the average American. It wasn't. Not really. Bucky was too unpredictable. Even if he went on a HYDRA killing spree, what would he do if someone got in the way?

Steve played the video over and over. A very fast murder on loop, every detail recorded from the traffic camera above. After fifty seconds, the radio in the bedroom cut in with, "—attack on the circulator just twenty minutes ago—" and Sam put down the phone and turned off the playlist and turned on the TV, and then Steve heard, "What? Why does it have to be the circulator? My sister takes that circulator."

The TV was interviewing witnesses. Most seemed too dazed to give any concrete information, though apparently Bucky had thought to put a child out of harm's way before beginning his spree, making him a highly interesting and newsworthy public menace. Steve consulted the internet. The internet also liked that kind of thing. True, a killer was on the loose in DC. Again. The same one, actually. The public had put that together within minutes. But, to Steve's surprise, the internet glossed over Bucky's terrifying codename, spent little time on any potential secret identity, and, more often than not, just captioned its blurry phone camera shots of him with, "that HYDRA guy who really hates our public transportation."

"Making him depressingly normal for DC," Sam said, catching a glimpse of all this over Steve's shoulder.

"We have to go get him," Steve said. Bucky had to be leaving a trail somehow. And only twenty minutes had passed. They could find him. They could do it.

"Steve," Sam said, reaching for the counter and pulling over his Starkpad. It was black and lifeless and then Sam's fingers tapped it awake and made it speak. A live feed on the scene. An anchorwoman in a hot pink jacket declaring it Official, Under Investigation, holy ground for police and government agencies. Not the kind of place Captain America should be seen.

"It was one thing when we thought he'd be heading out of town, and laying low," Sam said. "But now he's doing the opposite. You go out there, you'll paint a target on your back. I know you don't mind that, but timing, man. Timing is everything. You've read the file. What are the odds hehasn't vanished again?"

Depressingly low.

The Winter Soldier had been taught to vanish. It was probably automatic and involuntary on his part at this point. True, he was inherently chaotic, didn't have the ability to care about consequences, and had destroyed his fair number of buses. But, like a switch (in fact for a time in the 60s they'd tested him with a series of switches), he could go silent, circumspect. He could become a kind of latent illness, lying in wait, ready to flare up again at any minute.

He wouldn't be there. Steve could go to the site of the circulator attack, look around, possibly add more noise and panic to the moment: Captain America, arriving on the scene to catch That HYDRA Bus-Destroyer. But what would it accomplish? Besides proving certain pundits wrong, the ones who claimed he was in hiding, an irresponsible showboater that needed to be forced out.

But he found he didn't care to prove anyone wrong. Not right now. Not when it didn't serve something more than his own pride. Not with so many bigger things happening. Not in Sam's alive house, not with every particle of his brief old life gone, not with Bucky out there somewhere. And he very clearly wasn't hiding. He was at Sam's house for anybody who cared to look. He had a network he wasn't exactly unobtrusive about. He really could have gone down to the site of the attack and poked around and it wouldn't have been breaking cover, because he didn't have a cover. But already his phone was buzzing again. Preliminary reports, photos, names of passengers, even, which felt like a violation, which made him feel uneasy. The names he tucked away for last, not to be referenced unless it was necessary.

No one had been hurt besides the man on the roof of the bus, unidentified but, again, doubtlessly HYDRA. And Sam's sister wasn't on the list of passengers, so that was a relief. Sam went to call his sister anyway. She was probably panicking. Sam's soothing tone filled the horrible empty air and all those blank beige walls, but it reached the table, with all the files spread out on it, and suddenly lost much of its power.

The files had holes. Incomplete. But there was a lot there, and most of it disturbing. Not just the assassinations, both the twenty-seven Natasha had known about and twenty-six others. Fifty-three total. Fifty-three gone. The file was a gruesome chronicle of what preceded Project Insight, a masterful diagram of how to take a life and leave nothing but chaos and fear to fill in where the victim had been.

Fifty-three victims later, the chronicle sat silently on the table, and Steve realized it wasn't just a chronicle. It was a medical history.

Of victim fifty-four. Bucky.

In the night, once, when he couldn't wake Sam to talk about it, a stray thought had entered his mind. This file. It was the reverse of all those many similar files, years ago, passed from nurse to nurse, always very clinical, discussing the breakdown of Rogers, Steven G.'s lungs, back, feet, stomach, eyes, heart – all faulty components, every last one. Only HYDRA, lurking hidden beneath SHIELD, did things backwards. They presented every attack on Bucky as progression, not as a breakdown. They reveled in the loss of his arm. They praised the slow destruction and reworking of his reflexes and sight and hearing. They made synapses evaporate, turned grey matter to gristle, and when they were done they called it an achievement.

And Bucky hadn't always been with HYDRA. He'd been with the Soviets. He'd been loaned out to different terror cells. He'd been strapped into a box, a cryofreeze cabinet, and sent to storage, and waited out his days next to crates of old papers and packing materials, and there were pages and pages and pages of inspection slips, signed by low-level personnel whose job it was to count the number of shells in bay A-22, and the number of metallic wire rolls in bay A-23, and the number of Winter Soldiers in bay A-24 (one; what a shock), and then onto the number of spare rifle parts in bay A-25. And so on. Endlessly.

Someone, probably not Natasha, probably one of Natasha's contacts, had helpfully decoded it all into English. And so Steve could read for himself, and uncover where the horror lay. Victims one through fifty-three met their grisly end fairly quickly and often publicly. At the hands of the Winter Soldier, assassin. But Bucky, Bucky's assault had been a gradual thing. Private, held in back rooms, with clinical doctors leaning over him and methodically discussing how best to lobotomize him. And slow, carried out over months and years in a box, a storage prison, with a serial number assigned to him to differentiate him from the guns and the ammunition.

With regard to 36452 (Winter Soldier), Kovalenko did not properly secure the back of the apparatus to the wall, complained Ilyushin, D., Chief (whose job translated as 'Depot Inspector'). It has rolled out of place three meters and collided with the tanks of nitrate, which are very valuable and which will now have to be replaced. In pushing it back to its proper place, an inconvenience because it is very heavy, I have strained my back.

This should not have been as unsettling as the photographs of victims, the black ink marking off who would be more use dead than alive. But it was. This was proof that Bucky had been more use to them if he didn't have a spark of humanity in him at all. It wasn't the horror story of the Winter Soldier, assassin. It was the horror story of the Winter Soldier, attic ornament.

And yet there had to be, still inside him, a person.

Bucky had saved Steve's life. Or what was left of him had, working in tandem with the weapon that HYDRA and the Soviets and the terror cells and even America had forged. Either way, he was Steve's rescuer. Steve was sure of it, and slightly unsurprised by the whole thing. Because he hadn't been sure it would be Bucky, but he'd been counting on whoever it was, ghost or killer of vague echo of his friend, to know him. Steve Rogers. Not Captain America. Not a shield or a costume. But him. Even if everything else about Bucky had been stripped away, he thought, that part of him would still be there, that affection for the little guy. Bucky would never have lost that.

Steve had been willing to stake his life on it.

So Bucky himself had been identified. Some sliver of him, a little vein running through the Winter Soldier. Only whoever was out there now, not just the Winter Soldier but the Winter Soldier with a glimmer of a person inside him, was killing. Publicly. Chaotically. Still tied to his programming. He'd killed someone, and this time it hadn't just been the Winter Soldier doing the killing. It had been Bucky, too. What was left of Bucky. If the Winter Soldier had saved him, then there had to be, lurking somewhere beneath the skin of him, the last vestiges of Bucky Barnes. Transmuted into a killer.

This was the problem:

How could they make sure he didn't do it again? Do Not Approach. A band-aid, at best. Someone would approach at some point. Steve had to get to him before then.

And then, when he got to him:

What would all this even do to him? Bucky, the Soldier… There had to be a better term, one that encompassed both sides, that captured all the possibilities, but Steve didn't want to let go of the name Bucky, and so Bucky it was. Even if Steve knew it wasn't the same Bucky. But shat state would Bucky be in, if there was enough of him in there to feel horrified at his actions, somewhere down the line? What state was Bucky in now?

It occurred to Steve that, for a medical history, Natasha's file had nothing that could serve as a mental evaluation. Bucky's handlers simply hadn't cared. It would have been, Steve thought bitterly, like counseling a grenade launcher or a submachine gun. But they had to have assessed him. If only to make sure there was no him to assess.

Having taken stock of the whole file, Steve now combed through it with a purpose. Doctors. Brain specialists. Scientists. There had to be something, some name or title that corresponded to the people whose job it was to make sure that glimmer of Bucky Barnes stayed suppressed. People who would know best the mental landscape of the Winter Soldier, who thought he was nothing more than an appliance to be brought to life at the touch of a button, who had dissected him and put him to sleep and deleted and replaced whole chunks of him.

They wouldn't have the information he wanted: a diagnosis, some sign of how to proceed with Bucky as a person, some clue of how to help him. Whoever he was now, Steve wanted to help him.

But his… His doctors, for lack of a better term. They would have what Steve needed to do that. A better idea of the Winter Soldier's reactions, a clinical assessment of where certain components had failed, where Bucky had shone through, where they'd hadn't succeeded in eradicating Bucky completely.

But this was exactly the information that was missing. Bucky had been a point of pride for HYDRA and the terror cells and the Soviets alike, the best weapon of the nuclear age and beyond, a kind of brutality that even Howard Stark couldn't manufacture. And, passed around as a sign of good faith, traded and bargained for, no one had wanted to admit where he might have thrown off his programming, where they might have lost control of him. Now that Steve read the papers over more carefully, with an aim in mind, he could see what was missing. Exactly the names he needed.

The Soviets listed most of their people, though doubtlessly under codenames, and doubtlessly most were now dead. But here and there progress reports had been ripped away, relevant names blackened out. Bucky had been lent to a West German communist urban guerilla cell in the early 60s, assigned to wipe out a government official traveling near Aachen. But the results of the mission were not there. There were no details regarding his return. A later document confirmed that he'd been wiped after this mission, a small notation to prove a bigger point about how he was best suited as a native Soviet weapon. But who had wiped him and how and why – that was gone.

The terror cells in general didn't leave much paperwork. Steve gleaned that after Aachen there was usually a handler traveling with Bucky, someone to oversee him. But the only names listed were the ones that came with "sterling record" and "a credit to the program." The ones that had succeeded in keeping the Winter Soldier docile and completely dead inside, Steve bet. The ones that had failed at this? They'd been erased.

Natasha had included some details she had somehow salvaged from HYDRA, not just the bits of HYDRA exposed to the public through SHIELD, but deeper: the HYDRA that was still out there. These files listed no one who wasn't, like Bucky, a pawn and a weapon. The strike team had worked once or twice with Bucky, Steve discovered, and this made something heavy build in his veins, something that he had no outlet for.

But beyond the strike team there were few names that weren't aliases. HYDRA had begun as a science division, and they still prized scientists. These persons were afforded the greatest degree of anonymity, though, as with the Soviets, erased when it was clear they'd failed. The one document that offered any kind of clue was depressingly insufficient:

Have reviewed the asset's mental state. Testing loyalty and efficiency is not necessary, but merely desirable. It reinforces conditioning.

It was not signed, but Steve recognized the handwriting, because this was the man who'd signed off on every one of Captain Rogers's commendations for the past two years. Alexander Pierce. The mystery evaluation trail ended with Pierce. And he'd been remarkably good at covering his tracks. No one in Steve's network, not the former not-HYDRA people, not Fury, not Agent Hill, and not Natasha, had been able to uncover much about his work beyond what was intimately wrapped up in the day to day oversight of SHIELD. Where Pierce's activities had dropped off the map, where they linked him to other, non-SHIELD HYDRA operations? This was still missing.

Sam came in at this point, having placated his sister. He misinterpreted Steve's discouraged look and said, "Steve, trust me. Everyone is freaking out about this. It's not a good idea to go down there right now. They might find a way to haul you up before Congress or something."

Sam might be misinterpreting, but he wasn't incorrect. The site of the circulator attack was Official. The current Official attitude towards Captain America was indulgent and paternal when it seemed people liked him, hard and punishing when it seemed people didn't, and, where the two kinds of people were grouped together: ennui tinged with a vague desire to see consequences somewhere, somehow, no one was very sure where or how. But there definitely had to be consequences.

Possibly three sunken helicarriers and millions of lives saved weren't consequence enough.

Still, Steve put all that out of his mind and explained the facts. Which was that there were no facts. They'd need to understand Bucky's condition to help him, and possibly to stop him – because that was important, too. But there was nothing on Bucky's condition. It might help to know who had created that condition in the first place, but those people were missing or dead.

"Doctors and scientists and anything similar, up to and including HYDRA SHIELD directors who try to kill other SHIELD directors," Sam repeated, pulling over the Starkpad again. "All right. Well. You've been looking through that file all week. You've got that file. You know Bucky's history. I've been looking at HYDRA's."

Just the parts that intersected with SHIELD. That was all the world had. But it was something. More than something. Steve and Natasha and Sam and Fury and Agent Hill's work. Sam grinned as he coaxed it out of the Starkpad. They found doctors and scientists and section chiefs who were on Natasha's list, people who weren't HYDRA. Ten names Natasha hadn't cleared and probably were HYDRA, but three of these had never once matched up with Bucky, assigned to places nowhere near the Winter Soldier ever since HYDRA had acquired him. Two were dead, casualties either mowed down by the strike team or for assisting the strike team. And three more were far away, in cities it would take more than a day to reach, so Steve took them down and moved on to the last two. One, Dr. Brown, had retired from SHIELD three years ago, but before that he'd been here in DC at around the same time Bucky's file placed his entry into the city. When Bucky had been on hand as Alexander Pierce's secret weapon through the birthing pains of Project Insight. Dr. Brown was now in New York, where he ran a low-income family practice and nursing facility.

Suffice to say, he didn't initially seem like the HYDRA type. Steve really hoped he wasn't the HYDRA type. He apparently did some pediatric work.

The second, Dr. Stern, was still in DC. Had been, for a while. He'd never been with SHIELD long-term. He was brought on to do independent evaluations, that was all, to verify that certain operatives were fit for certain kinds of performance. He'd cleared, among others: Jason Wallace, Ewing Duncan, Michael Hale, Brock Rumlow, Alison Pearl.

"The strike team," Steve said. "A lot of those people were on the strike team."

"His dad's Senator Stern," Sam said, after a minute's research. "Andrew Stern."

HYDRA. Currently under arrest.

"We have no idea if the son was linked to Bucky or to HYDRA, though," Steve said thoughtfully.

"Sure," said Sam, and as he fiddled around with the Starkpad some more his voice filled up the room and sparked some hope in Steve, "But he recommended all these people to them. These aren't just SHIELD people. These are HYDRA, too. This guy – Rumlow – he bought the HYDRA Kool-Aid through and through. I fought him. Couldn't get him to shut up about it."

"So Stern knows what they look for in operatives, presumably," Steve said. "But Bucky wasn't an operative. We still don't know if he had any contact with—"

"Steve," Sam said. "Do these people seem like they want their operatives to be people? Or weapons? Assets. Because I've been looking them up. Bucky was probably something else, something darker than these guys, but I don't think there was a single higher-up who really trusted or liked people, Steve. It wasn't their thing. They wanted all assets, really. Besides," now he put the Starkpad down and displayed his work. "Nothing's private anymore. This guy's left his work and mailing addresses all over the internet. Here. East Capitol Street."

Sam grinned. "We might as well stop by."


	4. Chapter 4

The neighborhood surrounding East Capitol Street had some of the neatest front gardens in the District, with the tallest trees, the best-trimmed grass, and the most fragrant flowers. In late afternoon, with the sun setting picturesquely behind the Capitol building, the chief object of the street was promenades. Children in strollers rolled along, bumping happily towards the park. Pairs of young lovers in matching khakis paraded their credentials in loud voices on the way to Eastern Market. Determined persons jogged towards the Capitol Building. All were privileged to breathe in the tiger lilies, the freesias, the garden roses, and the hyacinths.

After they breathed it all in, most of them sneezed. They had developed terrible allergies. Their bodies mistook the local pollens for a budding infection.

Sam sneezed, too. Then he said, "Nice place," because it was. Dr. Stern's home had every charm the street could offer, all in one building. Colonial shutters and a porch suited to the antebellum South. Heavy Victorian brick and an Art Deco mailbox. A futuristic mid-century lamppost in the garden, and in the driveway two brand new black suburbans.

They'd gone to the office first. It had been empty, but just as beautifully historically confused. A woman leaving the house next door had seen them and smiled welcomingly and said, "Dr. Stern doesn't work today. But if you're from the Community Center – you're the people from the Community Center, aren't you? – then you can check his house. He usually answers the back door. His study is right there."

And this sort of trusting attitude said everything about the neighborhood, really.

"Remind you a little bit of Brooklyn?" Sam said, as they ducked into the sunny, cobbled alley next to Dr. Stern's house and made their way to the back door. Sam had been to Brooklyn once. He had a friend who lived near Park Slope. The reclaimed townhouses and too-genial sense of community were about the same. And he and Steve stayed up talking, sometimes, because Steve hadn't had someone to talk to in bed since—well. Ever. And through this he'd learned that Steve missed his old stomping grounds sometimes. He assumed Steve missed the spirit of trust and community that parts of Brooklyn had offered.

"What?" Steve said, confused. "No. This isn't like Brooklyn at all."

He was not privy to Sam's reasoning. This was good. It wouldn't have made sense to him anyway. His Brooklyn had not been present-day Park Slope, or even present-day Bushwick, and certainly nothing like East Capitol Street; his Brooklyn had been infinitely less genial in every way. When he'd tried to move back, he had fallen into searching out dangerous haunts: alleyways he'd once been beaten in, markets once run by racketeers, the grime-covered houses near the waterfront where the sailors used to go at night. And he found the houses replaced by condos, the markets selling kombucha to women with toddlers, and the alleyways closed off by gates, now private entrances and courtyards for adjoining buildings.

It was definitely an upgrade for Brooklyn. And Steve was happy for Brooklyn, for the most part. Only he'd found himself wishing, sometimes, that it were possible to peel away the skin of the new city to expose the old dirty heart of thing, even the ugly history that polluted the Brooklyn of his memories. It wasn't possible. So much for old Brooklyn. Steve didn't dwell on it too much.

He definitely didn't have time to dwell on it now. Dr. Stern's back door was slightly ajar. They could peer inside to the carpeted study, see some paneled ceilings and a chandelier and shelves full of books. But they had a better view of the house's interior from a window nearly level with the ground. It was broken. Glass littered the back garden and decorated the tiger lilies. Inside, a cheery basement apartment. A bed. A desk. A doorway. A man lying twisted on the sage-green carpet just beyond. His neck was unnaturally bent.

This would have been the perfect moment to summon SHIELD. This was what SHIELD was for. Moving in quietly, disposing of bodies, infecting the air with falsehoods for the common good. No bodies here. No violence. Nothing amiss. Captain America was never present, and so he suffers no backlash for this; no one needs to know anything happened at all.

But Steve had little use for that kind of subterfuge right now. He went in.

"Alright, alright," Sam said. "Hang on."

Sam had an external perspective on Steve, which was a valuable thing. Valuable for Steve, not for Sam. For Sam it was probably a nuisance sometimes. Steve was locked up in a self-made cabinet of right and fair. and necessary He was willing to walk right into someone's home – possibly someone from HYDRA's home – to uncover a murder. Right to the heart of things. This was Steve. This was also not always the best way. Steve couldn't always immediately see that for himself. He still wanted to operate like a direct boy from old Brooklyn, always. But he was no longer just that boy. He was also a modern renegade, somewhat suspect, and subject to the laws of DC. This was a war inside him, a battleground he probably wasn't even aware of: right squaring off against sensible.

He probably thought he could stride up to the corpse, examine it, then call it in. Call the police. Alert the neighborhood. If HYDRA and murder were afoot in the most trusting neighborhood in the District, then Steve would root through it and bring it all to the public eye.

Captain America Finds Corpse In Private Home He Had No Business Visiting Except Maybe To Track Down His Old HYDRA Buddy, said the internet, in Sam's mind. It didn't sound good. It didn't recommend Captain America to anyone. You had to know Steve, the guy below the surface, who wanted to do the right thing, in order excuse a headline like that.

And most people didn't know that guy. Not really.

"Let's think about this," Sam said, catching Steve's wrist and speaking low, in case the killer was still around. "Dead guy on the floor. This could be HYDRA internal politicking, or someone from another agency with a grudge, or even just a murder. But if you get found here—"

"It was Bucky," Steve said, looking down at Sam's hand thoughtfully. "See the neck? It was Bucky."

Steve had some of the best eyes on the planet. This is not a hyperbolic statement. It is factual. His vision was unmatched. He'd been locked in a green chamber, and glowing substances had been injected straight into his veins, and they had warred with all the less-than-perfect parts of him and conquered them. He had been re-worked, opened his eyes and found them new eyes entirely: upgraded components.

He could see now just what kind of danger Bucky was. Two corpses. In one hour.

Because Steve had seen, right away, the curious markings on the dead man's neck. Steve was no forensic expert, but he didn't have to be. He'd marched through the dead piled all across Europe, and once found a throttled man in an alleyway behind a bar; he knew force and pressure and death intimately now. And he had spent long nights staring at those forty dead bodies in the file, and seen where some had been snuffed out by a telltale metal arm.

Bucky had beaten them here. Maybe to kill one of his former tormentors, or maybe to kill an innocent. The corpse's face wasn't fully visible, so Steve couldn't be sure that it was Dr. Stern. He suspected it wasn't. Dr. Stern on the internet was a smiling picture of a man at a charity medical ball, thin and balding at a relatively young age. While the dead man was muscular and had a full head of hair. But then who knew if Bucky had killed Dr. Stern, too? They needed to go in to find out.

Though he understood Sam's concern. The boy from old Brooklyn inside him did want to do things fairly, because so few people from old Brooklynhad. He didn't want to take what he needed from the scene, then vanish without alerting anyone, or worse, have it all taken care of quietly. Better to call the cops, like anyone else would have. Operate the correct way. No unfair advantages, no lies, no erasing his tracks. And if it turned out he needed to come clean about tracking Bucky down, he would. He wanted to help Bucky. But he was also done with positioning himself above other people, or with sinking below the surface and hiding things. If it would serve some purpose, help the public somehow, then he would gladly call in the police.

That was the transparent thing to do. The right thing. Even if it could put an unflattering spotlight on Captain America and, by extension, Bucky Barnes.

And they had to call in someone. Report the death somehow. To someone official. Calling the police might draw too much attention, but there was a middle ground. Natasha's network. His memory was as good as his vision, so he had the names, the people, all retained. Both their value as information centers and their human parts, the things that had made them not choose HYDRA, the strange romantic asides about them. He worked through them within a minute, gently set aside those who couldn't help or who would have been unduly burdened, considered the remainder, settled on one who seemed best equipped.

"Stern's father was HYDRA," Steve said slowly. "He's linked to an—an international terror group."

This seemed to come out of nowhere, apropos of nothing. Other people would have taken it as a kind of misdirection, deliberately roundabout. But Sam knew Steve better than that. He knew Steve didn't do that. He waited for Steve to cycle around to his point, trusted that this would go somewhere important.

"HYDRA's got connections to overseas terrorists, and has already infiltrated a major American agency," Steve said. Then he smiled, small and odd. Steve's real smiles were like this. He didn't often produce them when he was happy; he wasn't really happy that often. Instead he produced them when he'd made a link to something. "Would the CIA be interested in that? Do you think?"

"Sure," Sam hazarded. "If you could call them in, which maybe you can, but. Well. Maybe."

Steve nodded. He had only spoken to this contact a few times: to figure out where she was now, and whether she wanted to help him, and how she could. Her voice had sounded vaguely familiar. She spoke highly of Natasha, and Natasha of her. He'd received the impression that maybe this was one of the women Natasha had been so insistent he meet, the one with the nose ring, probably, because there was kind of a determined edge to her voice and she'd seemed like the nonconforming type. He still didn't really want to go there; he and Sam weren't exclusive, but still. But he had a good feel for people, Steve. He'd learned from her that she was CIA now, she would help, and she would do it the way Sam did, because it needed doing.

So he could report this, come clean. He didn't have to shove it into the shadows, make sure no one but his inner circle touched it, the way SHIELD had done. He'd hand it over to another government agency, but to someone who was definitely not HYDRA. And he had one or two other contacts, people in local law enforcement and reporters, who they would loop in once the timing was right. And once he'd called Sharon Carter in he'd explain, though he was sure this was a little bit unfair to her, that this couldn't stop at the CIA, that people deserved to know what was going on, that they could hold it in trust if they had to, but not if it hid something crucial, and not forever.

People deserved to know about Bucky, even. Who he was, what had happened to him. What it took to make a man, a good man, into a weapon. How easy it was. Who had done it.

What he'd done.

But this made Steve's smile vanish. This was a deeper problem, and a more painful one, and one he couldn't solve for Bucky, probably, or at least not without Bucky's input. And it was a problem he didn't have to tackle right now. Right now he had only Dr. Stern, and the corpse in the basement apartment.

They went in. Steve locked the basement door and drew the cheery yellow curtains closed around the window, so that passerby wouldn't see what was going on, but he left a sliver open, in case they needed to see what was happening, if Bucky was going to escape through an upstairs window, if HYDRA agents were sweeping the upper stories right now. They needed to sweep the house, him and Sam, before they did anything else. But no sooner had they made it three steps than they heard a muffled shout. Steve held Sam off with a hand, positioned himself with his back to the wall, feet very close to the corpse's head, and looked around the corner.

Dr. Stern. Bound and gagged. Bruising around his face, left there by metal fingers that were by now very familiar to Steve. Steve stepped back and let Sam have a look. Sam glanced at Dr. Stern, then down to the corpse, assessing the new problem and the old. After a minute, he pointed around the corner to where the doctor was and mouthed, "I take him. You're too—" Sam's eyes raked up and down Steve's form, "—You."

Obvious. Recognizable. And they suspected Stern was HYDRA. And they didn't know who he reported to. Steve nodded.

"Block his vision," he mouthed to Sam. "While I sweep the house."

Sam nodded. He straightened and stepped over the corpse, into Dr. Stern's line of sight. The doctor's muffled shouts took on a frantic urgency. Sam mimed horror (not inexpertly, and it didn't take much miming, since the situation was pretty horrifying) and said, "Oh my god, man. What's going on? I saw broken glass outside and just thought—"

He was laying it on a little too thick, but it didn't matter. Dr. Stern was hysterical enough not to notice. He was shouting so much through his gag that his face was purple.

"Oh, you know what?" Sam said. "Let me get you untied." At Dr. Stern's frenzied nods, he approached, pretended to survey the man's bonds for the first time, and then said, "Oh, god, somebody's tied your hands behind you. Here, let me get those undone." He manhandled the doctor so he was facing the wall behind him, with his trapped hands in front of Sam, then turned to Steve and nodded.

Steve crept across the room silently while Sam made a show of undoing the doctor's bound hands. Steve surveyed the room, the kitchen nook just beyond, the bathroom off the side, the closets, the basement just downstairs. Then he took the stairs swiftly, silently, while Sam continued to talk to the Doctor in low, soothing tones, taking his time with the sheets and kitchen towels binding him.

The house had three more stories. No Bucky in them. No HYDRA agents, either. It was a cluttered house, a house with too much, all of it gilded and renovated, a confused mishmash of new and old: antique tables, gleaming appliances, heavy and valuable pictures in frames, a flatscreen TV in the kitchen, in the bathroom, in every bedroom, walk-in closets, old-fashioned chandeliers, an exercise room, a huge sweeping staircase, a home theatre, the historic-seeming study, a roof deck, a small elevator. Steve called Sharon Carter, who said she'd be on hand in forty-five minutes or less. He figured that was about as much time as it would take to look through the endless.

"Though, Captain," Sharon told him, "If we're going to meet face-to-face, then you should know— I mean, not that it's important, but—"

"Then tell me when you get here," he said curtly, and went back to sweeping the building. He made it back downstairs checked over the body, noted everything he could, careful not to leave traces of himself. It was easy. Like patting down a HYDRA corpse in Pforzheim in 1944. When he went again to the first floor he heard Sam and Dr. Stern in the study. Sam had set him free at last. And Dr. Stern seemed mostly grateful. Steve hung back, listened.

"Are you sure you didn't know him? He didn't kill you," Sam was saying.

This was really the place to start. Bucky hadn't killed Dr. Stern. Why? Was Dr. Stern not HYDRA? And if he was HYDRA, would Bucky mind at this point?

Dr. Stern took Sam to be consoling him. On the surface, Sam was. Sam was good at consoling, counseling, talking people through things. Dr. Stern might have had his own practice, but he didn't stand a chance against Sam.

"I thought he was going to!" the doctor said, still frantic. "I didn't even know who he was! I've never met him before in my life—"

What were the odds that was true? Steve turned it over in his head. Dr. Stern would hardly admit it if he had met Bucky before, because he would have had to go through HYDRA. But there was something like honesty laced through his panic. His fear and confusion seemed genuine.

"—breaks into my house," continued Dr. Stern. "I mean, you hear about it on TV, watch it in shows. But it's not supposed to happen in real life!"

"Well, statistically when someone breaks in like this, it's somebody you've met before," Sam said.

"Never in my life!" said the doctor.

"At least the place looks untouched. I know he killed – Jake, was it? The bodyguard? But it doesn't look like he stole anything," Sam continued, leading the doctor on. Because that ran into their next question. What had Bucky even wanted? Had he come here to dispatch Dr. Stern's bodyguard and nothing more? Why did a doctor even have a bodyguard? And why would Bucky want to kill him?

"Oh, God," said Dr. Stern. "He might have! He—I thought he was some lunatic. He heard I was a psychiatrist, and he said he wanted treatment."

"Treatment?" Sam said sharply.

Bucky had wanted treatment?

"He wanted me to fix him. 'Bring me back. Put it all back in,' he said."

Steve looked up sharply. His memories. Bucky wanted his memories back. Steve had been cautiously operating as though there was very little of Bucky left, and even considering that Bucky might not want to be James Buchanan Barnes again. Bucky had spent a lifetime in boxes and in storage, unpacked only when necessary to make a brutal statement. Who knew what that did to a person? There was no reason to think that, whoever Bucky was now, he would want to be restored to himself. There was no real reason to think he'd know what it was to want at all.

But if he wanted his memories, then—

"He said, 'Make me blank again,'" Dr. Stern said, and it was like a blow. "That's what he told me! And he rifled through the house, and through my daughter's things—through Amy's things—oh, god, what if he did take something?"

Steve honestly didn't care if he had. Blank again. Blank. Bucky had—he'd come here to be wiped.

Steve hadn't felt sick since 1942. But Stern's words had triggered something in him, and suddenly he couldn't breathe, and it was psychosomatic for sure, but that didn't make it any less unpleasant.

His phone shook in his pocket, and he grit his teeth like he used to do when he was asthmatic, told himself just put the horrible feeling out of his mind, and now, unlike back then, it worked. He forced the stopped-breath sensation down. Then he went back to the basement to meet Sharon Carter. He stepped over the body, noted, for the first time, the books scattered near where Dr. Stern had been bound: novels, textbooks, old computer manuals. He told himself he was calm. He was. Calm stretched over him like a second skin. It had to. They had a dead body on their hands, a possible HYDRA operative in the study, and a Winter Soldier all over the news.

But underneath that skin, in a place Steve couldn't think about right now, he wasn't calm at all. He was unhappier than he'd been in months. And for the past few months he hadn't exactly been happy to begin with.

He opened the door to the garden.

"Captain," his former neighbor said.


	5. Chapter 5

This chapter is really Sharon's. We go back to Bucky soon.

* * *

Sharon Carter had been in McLean, Virginia when she'd gotten the call, in a house that was modest for the neighborhood, which wasn't saying much. It was tan brick, very conservative. Blue shutters and a portico with white marble columns. From the air, from an agent's helicopter, the place would be a not-insubstantial network of white roofs, white sunroom, two pretty balconies. Surrounded by a fresh green lawn stretching out in all directions with more than enough room to make an easy landing. In other words, a perfect suburban TV house, where the exterior gave nothing away. Maybe larger than most. It almost called for an American flag next to the door, but there wasn't one. Only some bright purple and yellow flowers.

Here lived the love of the Captain's life.

Peggy Carter had two keepers: a pair of home health aides. They wore crisp pink scrubs. One was always lining pills up with great precision in a color-coded weekly dispenser whenever Sharon came by. There always seemed to be more pills than available dispenser slots.

There were pictures on the walls of the house. Peggy Carter and a former First Lady. Peggy Carter and two former secretaries of defense. Peggy Carter and her husband. Peggy Carter and three war heroes and one renowned scientist and a little girl and a colonel and a billionaire and a dog. Sharon was the little girl. One of the war heroes was still around somewhere, possibly in a nursing facility. The dog, regrettably, had died. So had most of the others. So not that many people came to visit besides Sharon. That was alright. Peggy wouldn't have recognized them. She wasn't all there.

This was obvious, because of the house.

The house's exterior was fine: typical and traditional, with cars in the drive and a sprinkler whirring away. The inside was a different story. All the accoutrements of a life well lived were present: photos, awards, books on the shelves, letters in frames with happy, friendly signatures on them. _To Peggy. Love, Pat Nixon._ But there were no shoes strewn on the floors, there was no clutter anywhere, the glass in the windows was so clean it seemed to be missing entirely, the curtains were all perfectly pleated and drawn just so, like they'd been arranged by mechanical hands. The most interesting things in the house were all those color-coded pills.

It was a beautiful house. It made Sharon depressed. She couldn't speak of this depression to anyone, really, because it was such a beautiful house. And it was in a part of McLean that was very, very beautiful, that put East Capitol Street and even Dupont Circle, where Sharon had lived for a time, to shame.

So no one would have understood.

Sam (though she hadn't yet met Sam) would have. Sam knew a guy. Martinez. A strike had gone wrong near Ghazni, and now Martinez existed inside a room, waited on hand and foot by his sister. His sister was a good person. Always in and out, making sure there were no signs of Martinez's issues that anyone could detect. She polished Jesus in his frame near the door. She arranged lacy things on the side table. She refused to let laundry pile up. Every time Sam went over, he thought the place looked a little cleaner, a little more manically perfect. Like a museum display. Or a very upscale hospital.

The inside of Peggy Carter's house was like this. A whole, human, totally _there_ woman might exist there. But it couldn't be her home. She would've have left some sign of herself in her home. That was what healthy people did: they left evidence of themselves, and no one thought to scrub the evidence away. Not so for the sick. Everyone usually assumed that sickness meant clutter and chaos, but, for lucky sick people, who had a pair of hands on hand to rub away all the evidence of illness, it could also mean regimented order. Pills in boxes. Every picture frame a little too straight.

It was a dead giveaway. Healthy people's homes weren't half as impersonal as Peggy's. This was why Sharon hated the house, hated every clean conservative corner of it. Even Peggy's room, more lived-in than the rest of the house, she hated. She hated the huge fireplace at one end, the side tables full of clutter that would vanish at the touch of the health aides, the fine dining room chairs against one wall, and the hospital bed in the middle of the room piled high with pillows. Arranged against them, propped up, was the only thing in the house Sharon loved.

Aunt Peggy. The woman who had quietly shaped the century, and rather forcefully shaped Sharon's world. But Sharon's world was being invaded. Not by anything in particular. Just age. Age creeping through her grey matter, an invasion, severing connections, blanking out her brilliance, a war on Peggy Carter, but a quiet one. One that progressed in fragments of lost time, in quick shifts of mood. So that little by little all the Peggy bled away, in small tics and quiet memories, each one a casualty, Missing In Action, never to be recovered.

There was nothing Sharon could do about this. There was nothing Sharon could do, either, about the fact that what Peggy _had_ left the world – SHIELD – had also been invaded. Infiltrated. HYDRA had crept inside, warping it; anything the organization had to offer was slowly poisoned, rendered rotten.

At the time Steve Rogers called her, she'd been discussing this with Peggy. She discussed a lot of things with Peggy. Most people would have found this ridiculous; Peggy couldn't retain anything. But, in a way, that made it easier. In the vast house, with the aides off organizing pills in distant rooms, just Sharon and her remarkable aunt and all those pillows, Sharon could lay out her problems, and Peggy – always the best of agents – still had enough in her to listen. Then to quietly forget. Sharon's problems never went beyond the room. And they never burdened Peggy.

"Gone?" Peggy was saying. Her voice was fainter than it had been years ago, but this just meant that she spoke like she was imparting secrets. Like there would always be the touch of the agent about her. "Go over it again, Sharie. Be clear this time."

And so Sharon had laid it out, very quietly and resolutely.

"One exit point. Four men on it," she began. "All cleared by Central Intelligence _and_ the Bureau; no connection to SHIELD—"

"SHIELD?" Peggy said sharply. She blinked her dark, hooded eyes. Her blinks seemed to shut down some brilliant spark only to reboot it again. To Sharon, it was like a momentary dimming of the whole room.

"Remember what I told you," Sharon said. She said it a little gently, with a kind of smile that wasn't really a smile. She had her aunt had the same not-smile, but neither realized it. It was a strangely private smile. When Sharon saw it on her aunt, it always struck her that Peggy had probably built up a reserve of somberness over a lifetime, one that she carried in her expression. And not even the smile could dispel it. But by now Peggy had completely forgotten that the somberness was there. So she smiled very freely, particularly when with her niece, and it was always a striking, solemn thing.

"What did you tell me?" Peggy said.

"SHIELD," Sharon said. "Remember? We talked about it. Zola's—"

"Oh, right," Peggy said, a little too quickly. Peggy wasn't completely gone. She knew sometimes that she didn't know things. And, a lifetime of dissembling kicking in, she would rush to convince people that she still had her memories, still had all the facts. This kind of clever cover-up had come in very handy at SHIELD. But it didn't fool Sharon.

"Zola, of course," Peggy said. "He drives Howard mad. Which reminds me, Sharie. Don't take the position. The organization's changed."

A frequent exhortation from Peggy. That possibly Sharon should have listened to.

"But what's the problem?" Peggy continued. "You haven't told me the problem."

"One exit point. Four men on it," Sharon repeated. "All—" She thought about how to phrase this. She hated lying to Peggy, or covering things up. Strange, because Sharon had no qualms about doing this in any other situation. Peggy herself had taught Sharon that honesty wasn't always the best or easiest solution. Some things you had to sink beneath the skin for a time, let sit.

But, in a cruel twist of fate: the easy way out with Peggy now was often to do just that. Lie to her, humor her, nod and smile. New information didn't stick to her, and upsetting news might only agitate her, and so it was better to handle her like a child. To dismiss her when necessary. Sharon had done it one or two times, when she'd been busy, or wrapped up in a mission, when Peggy was just a faint voice on the other end of the line.

But she always hated doing it.

"It's like a locked room mystery," Sharon began again. This wasn't a lie. It was just a kind of gloss thrown over the situation, simplifying it a little. It took it out of the realm of real life – where Peggy Carter's life's work sat in ruins in the Potomac, was dissected at congressional hearings – and brought it into the world of story. Like Peggy used to do with her when she was little, talking her through her problems by making them more straightforward.

"There's an – an enemy combatant. Captured. Our prisoner. In a locked room," Sharon continued. Actually, Rumlow wasn't just an enemy. He was SHIELD. And also HYDRA. But that would only upset and confuse Peggy. "One exit point. No windows, no vents in the ceiling, nothing but six feet of concrete beneath the floorboards. Four walls, with one door. And then four men, each vetted within an inch of their lives, cleared by multiple reliable agencies."

Peggy nodded, listening.

"The combatant is wounded," Sharon went on. "Badly. Severe lacerations to his limbs, multiple fractures—"

"Are you just throwing me all the data you're overwhelmed with to see if it will stick? Or using your head and your instincts to figure out what's important?"

Sharon stared her.

"Do I need his medical history to help you?" Peggy said, a little exasperatedly.

"No," Sharon said, thinking it over. "I mean. Yes. I'm sort of just throwing you data because I'm confused. But the important stuff is... Well. Let's just say he can't walk out of there, definitely can't take down the men at the door, and would be recognized anywhere he goes."

"But he vanishes," Peggy said, grasping the mystery at once. She was sick, but she was still Peggy in some ways. And Peggy had never been stupid.

"We don't know how he got out," Sharon said, letting some of her frustration shine through. "The doctors and nurses didn't do it. They're all accounted for at the time he left and for every working minute leading up to that. The ward is covered with cameras, and they're used to working with prisoners like this. That's why he was brought there in the first place. The four guards didn't do it. They have too much to lose. But someone had to have helped him. He was incapacitated, and—"

"Was he?" said Peggy.

"Well, we skipped the medical history—" Sharon said, a little petulant.

Peggy was used to this from her niece, and just rolled her eyes at her. "Yes, but maybe there's more to him. Sometimes people have hidden depths."

Sharon snorted. Because. _Rumlow_.

"Ex-marine," she said, after a minute. "And a hundred percent committed to his cause, takes any order without hesitation. Passed every test ever given to him. Big, fast. He's a soldier."

"Oh, dear," Peggy said. "He's a bully, you mean."

Sharon stared at her. She hadn't said that.

"It's in your tone," Peggy told her, a little smug.

Shaorn didn't mind the smugness. It was personality; it was some glimmer of Peggy. There had been a vibrant, healthy, living woman inside Peggy Carter at some point. And sometimes she was still there: in sudden exclamations, in the way her eyes would go calm and reserved, in the connections she could make. Something had wormed its way inside her, some kind of reset virus. It could stall her. Wipe away the conversation. Supplant it with old ghosts. But Peggy was a fighter, and it hadn't taken her down yet. Not completely.

"Besides," Peggy continued, exhaling and looking somewhere beyond Sharon, deep into the recesses of the antiseptic house. "I know the type. Everyone always thinks men like that are such a terrific bet. Now the question is: is your bully enhanced somehow? And, going with your instincts here, does it matter either way?"

"I—" Sharon said. Enhanced? There was nothing on it in any of the released SHIELD files. And he had taken the explosions at the Triskelion like a normal person, which was to say: by nearly dying. So. Probably not. But this was HYDRA, and you couldn't put anything past HYDRA, and—

And it turned out that she was focusing on the wrong question.

"Does it matter?" Peggy repeated again, slowly this time.

"I—" Sharon didn't follow.

"You're lingering on the fact that somehow he got out," Peggy said. "But it's done. He's gone. The more important question isn't _how_ or _who_. It's _why_. Everything follows from that."

Sharon thought on this.

"Say he's enhanced," Sharon began. "He gets out on his own. Why would he do it? Why wouldn't he? He's not going to meet a good end if he stays, and he's loyal to his employers. Very loyal. He wouldn't want to risk being questioned and letting anything about them slip. But that's only if he can get out on his own, which he can't without enhancement, and enhancement for him might be a long shot. He was pretty badly wounded, like anybody else would be…"

Peggy sat back on the pillows and placidly raised an eyebrow at her.

"So his people probably got him out," Sharon said grimly. HYDRA. Obviously. But then— "Why would they do it? They probably aren't as loyal to him as he is to them. They're not the kind to place a great value on the individual—"

"Right, well, they never are," Peggy murmured, still watching her.

"—and we made it difficult for them. Not only was he barely mobile or conscious, but we made sure he was locked up tight, and—" Then it hit her. "That's exactly why. That's why they did it. Because we made it impossible for them. And—and they want to show us that it doesn't matter."

Peggy closed her eyes, satisfied.

There was a pitilessness that characterized Peggy sometimes. A too-direct streak in her. It wasn't a cruel thing. It was simply a small strain of the matter-of-fact, a curious trait in an agent: her need to put forth plain reality, to mark with certain authority the ugly truths kept out of sight. And here was the ugly truth: it did not matter who HYDRA had turned to their side, how they'd freed Rumlow. What mattered was that they had done it. Who could have freed him? Anyone. That was the point. HYDRA wanted to hammer home that when you cut off one head – in this case, SHIELD – more would appear. In other agencies. And even if they'd only turned one good agent, now four men were under lock and key, countless valuable medical personnel were rendered highly suspect, and two agencies were frantic. It only took one agent for HYDRA to shut down government operations as surely as Captain America did. Only HYDRA did it from the inside, turning their own paranoia against them.

"This is one way to turn the loss of SHIELD into their gain," Sharon said bitterly, without thinking. "Now they can see how many more agencies they can slowly take apart, just by letting us know they're there."

Peggy opened her eyes, confused, and Sharon almost kicked herself. But her aunt didn't ask about SHIELD. She didn't ask about anything. She blinked again. A reboot. The room dimmed.

"Sharie," she said, a little crossly. "Is this another problem that's come up? I told you not to take the position. Don't take the position, Sharie. The organization's changed."

The air in the antiseptic house suddenly seemed contaminated somehow. Peggy wasn't contagious, of course. But every flare-up served to underscore the loss of her, to demonstrate that, underneath all her humor, and her ruthless teaching, and her clever insights—

She was slipping away.

Sharon's phone buzzed. She answered it gratefully, and felt guilty for it, and on the other end was Captain America. He wanted her to deal with a dead body. That was fine. She needed to get out of the house. She kissed Peggy goodbye ("But you've only just arrived!" Peggy protested), and told the aides they could come back to settle her in now, and on her way out she passed the treasured wall near the door, where the best photographs were kept. Sharon and her brothers featured heavily. Her Aunt and Penelope Hawley had a prime spot by the coat stand. A skinny man in a gilt frame took center stage. And by the door, bleached by the sun streaming in through the panes on either side, were her aunt, Howard Stark and his wife, a crying baby, and Alexander Pierce.

That seemed wrong. Sharon lifted the photo off its hook, determined to throw it in the nearby trash bin, but one of the aides stepped out into the hall just as she did so, with a question about when Sharon's brother would be by to visit.

She stopped and stared at Sharon.

"She said I could have this," Sharon said quickly. But when she got the thing back to her car she ground it beneath her boot, shattering the glass. Then, to put Peggy and SHIELD out of her mind, she began to compose in her head all the paperwork that would accompany this business of helping Captain America. She worked in what brief facts she'd been able to glean from their conversation.

_Captain appears to be tracking a HYDRA operative named – identity unknown. He has uncovered the murder of – identity unknown. Agent is complying with all requests for the time being. Captain is probably aware Agent will be reporting to Central Intelligence on his activities. Captain has indicated he will publicize the details of the murder through other contacts in media. Agent has not yet determined their identities. Natasha Romanoff a.k.a. Black Widow facilitated connection between Agent and Captain. Romanoff has done this because-_

Well. Sharon had no idea. The Widow had said, "I think the two of you could help each other," almost a little too perkily. Like she was prescient. Like she could have figured out the whole Rumlow clusterfuck in two seconds flat, if someone had presented it to her.

Then she'd added, "Are you in?" And then she'd hung up, leaving Sharon with one of her weird untraceable phones and a dead line.

Possibly the Widow had just thrown her into the Captain's orbit because Sharon wasn't HYDRA, because what Sharon was hiding was just simple CIA agent business. But probably it was a little more complicated than that. The Black Widow could read people. Humans, messy sacks of flesh with messier spiraling emotions, didn't look so messy from wherever she sat. She read them like they were bits of code; a conversation with her wasn't so much a conversation; it was a chance for her to download some small imprint, to retrieve information from you, like you were her own personal flash drive.

Sharon wondered if she knew about Peggy. Probably she did.

She felt irritated. She wanted to shoot something, or break something. But she would have had to lift her foot from the pedal to grind it down on Pierce's picture again, so she didn't do that. And so she made it to East Capitol Street in record time. The neighborhood had little effect on her. She'd been here a thousand times before. She had friends living nearby, but the mishmash of nostalgia and affability wasn't her thing. East Capitol Street didn't feel particularly charming and vibrant to her. All those khaki-trousered people with strollers were very typical, very DC, all airing their credentials with mechanical regularity.

Captain America seemed surprised to see her. He probably should have let her explain on the phone. To his credit, he recovered admirably and led her to the body. He had come here looking for someone, but had found a dead someone else instead.

Sharon stared at the body. She recognized it. She had pored over the leaked SHIELD files and knew hole in them, every curious unexplained dead end.

"This guy worked for Senator Stern," she said. "He was about to have a detail put on him. He's linked to HYDRA. The guy you're tracking is HYDRA, too?"

Captain America put a hand uneasily to the back of his neck. "I never said that," he said evasively.

It turned out that they were in Stern's son's house. That Stern's son – also linked to HYDRA – was upstairs. Being questioned by an associate of the Captain's.

"He was a doctor. He examined Brock Rumlow?" Sharon said. This shouldn't matter. Aunt Peggy had helped her unravel the ugly truth at the heart of Rumlow's disappearance – that Rumlow didn't matter at all, that the chaotic hole HYDRA could leave in his wake mattered more to them than their own operative.

But Aunt Peggy also trusted instincts. And Sharon's instincts were screaming at her right now. The connection between her case and the Captain's. It was tenuous. But maybe it would lead somewhere. Preferably somewhere appropriately HYDRA-destroying.

"I'm taking him in for questioning," Sharon said. "Rumlow—he's cause for concern. And if this guy can tell us anything about him, then that's something."

This gave Captain America pause for some reason. He put an uneasy hand to the back of his neck. Looked unsure. Said, after a minute, "He knows about more people than Rumlow."

Sharon stared at him. He didn't volunteer any more information. Whatever he wanted to say had sunk somewhere inside him and didn't make its way back out.

"The person you were looking for?" Sharon asked lightly.

"You report to the CIA," the Captain said. "Given my experience with agencies like that…"

Ah. He didn't want to talk. But Sharon still wanted a little more out of him. She thought of Peggy, reclining on the pillows, letting her sit and talk and talk until she hit the main point. Sharon kneeled down next to the corpse and began mentally composing a message to her contacts at HQ. She let the Captain sit.

The Captain seemed to think on something, for a minute, as though he were troubled. Some conflict Sharon didn't know about working below the surface of him. After a minute, he said, "You're passing on everything about me, right? I—"

He seemed to come to a decision. Said, "I'm tracking someone. I know she told you that much."

The Widow hadn't.

"I need to know what you get out of Stern," the Captain said. "And if I learn anything about Rumlow, I'll loop you in."

That seemed fair. Sharon tried to decide if she would go along with it. For now.

"And if—if you find anything," the Captain continued. "About the operative who killed this man—" he gestured down at the corpse. "I need to know about it. I don't know if there's a leak to HYDRA in Central Intelligence, and if they get to him before I do, the results could be bad."

Sharon stared down at the corpse, the mangled neck. She put together some of what must have happened here. She decided that it would be bad, apparently for HYDRA, and that she didn't want to lie to her employers. But the Captain – Aunt Peggy's old flame, which. Kind of awkward – it couldn't hurt to have him involved. As a check on whatever HYDRA was throwing their way.

Sharon nodded.

"The killer. That's your guy," Sharon said. "The one you're trailing."

"That's my guy," said the Captain, with a tight nod. "The one I'm trailing."

Why. That was the question. _Why_. The good Captain was hiding something.

"I need to call this in," Sharon said. "Are you going to be here? You're kind of high profile. I can stay with Stern until my people get here, but—"

"That's fine," the Captain said quickly. "Just let me make sure my – my associate's done."

Sharon nodded to him. Then she went out to her car to get her phone. Not the untraceable one the Widow had apparently handed out like a party favor (Congrats! You were at the death of SHIELD!), but the normal one, that could be traced and tracked by any number of people. The Bureau. Central Intelligence. HYDRA. She didn't have clearance for the good phones yet – the ones no one but her superiors could touch. She was still a rookie, albeit a rookie with interesting connections.

It probably wasn't being traced, the phone. But she had left it in the car anyway, in case anyone was listening in. Better safe than sorry.

It was in her bag, on the floor of the car, and unfortunately there was glass all around it. Sharon picked some of the glass up gingerly, and also the picture frame, feeling slightly ashamed and highly un-agentlike. An unsolvable case that didn't matter very much. No real phone. Her own personal grudge framed on the floor of her Mazda.

Sharon propped the picture on the dash and put it out of her mind.

When she went to lift the bag out her phone toppled out and onto the other seat. She dove for it. She heard someone clear their throat behind her.

Captain America. He was staring at the picture on the dash.

"Sharon _Carter_," he said, looking unhappy.

Well. He couldn't be the only one with secrets sunk inside him.


	6. Chapter 6

No more buses. Staying out of sight would be best. The Winter Soldier simply knew this. He knew because of the black and heavy emotion in him. Embarrassment again. Shame. The sense that he'd somehow wronged all those people on the bus.

So he found a place to be alone. A house with a sign in front. Foreclosure. He had no way of knowing what that meant, but it was on the tattered papers pinned to the front windows. The house was on a grey and listless cul de sac far from the city center, accessible only by several snaking grey highways, in a place that was all ugly brown brick and modern white wood doors.

The inside was deserted. He found a quiet spot, where he had a good view of the door and three windows (why this mattered, he didn't know; that it mattered at all was a thing he didn't even consider; he just knew it mattered; it was programmed into him), and then there he sat. And thought.

He had great difficulty understanding why he'd done what he'd done. He should have gone back to his keepers. He would have been repaired.

There was a mirror left in the house, sitting just across from him. It was part of what made this spot such a good vantage point. And in the mirror he could see his reflection. It was not unlike the martyr in the museum: _James Buchanan Barnes_. Bucky Barnes. For the first time, he could remember seeing a similar face often, always for a split instant in the glass, just before it frosted over and he lost sight of it. And then shuttering into view, with a twisted expression, just as the ice receded and he was taken out. Always that same face in the glass window. He realized now that he'd always assumed it was someone else. Some horrified person with panic filling up their dead gaze, then spilling over and contorting their expression in the minutes before the cold drained away and he found he could move again.

It was like all the emotions had been happening to someone else. To the glass face. The person he'd had no idea he was.

Now he could only stare, with no small degree of mistrust, at this same face in the mirror. It was not familiar to him in this form. Bucky Barnes, in the museum, had not been wholly foreign. He'd stared and stared then too, sure he'd known something about Bucky Barnes. And then something had occurred to him. Two whole hands, a smart suit, a jar of some overpowering scent – Brylcreem – and then the hands slicking back the dark hair, and then there he was, Bucky Barnes, in another mirror some indeterminate time ago, with his eyes very human and his collar not _quite_ right, thinking it would have to be ironed and maybe not this tie, maybe the other one.

But this person, now, in the mirror, was not Bucky Barnes. The features all lined up in similar ways, but the things that mattered were wrong. The heavy rise and fall of the chest. The horribly alive eyes, shadowed and confused. The mouth, drooping, like a wounded animal about to bare its teeth. Like there was no purpose and no reason to hold it up and make the determined expression that had characterized the American martyr.

He was not Bucky Barnes. That much was clear. He was something entirely different. Some waking and unacceptable part of him balked at calling himself the _asset_, though that felt right and almost comforting in its familiarity; and he could not call himself Bucky Barnes; and when he stared at the mirror all he knew was that he was under attack. He was curled up. He was watching the door and the windows. He was scared to look in his own eyes; there was too much there.

He remembered being scared and cold and his heart pounding; a light shooting up into the sky like a firework at a fairground (_Let's ride the Cyclone_, said the poison shooting through his mind), and a gun in his hands, and all around him men screaming. Aside from the intrusive _alive_ sensation the memory gave him, it was almost soothing. Guns in his hands felt right. Screaming was not new. But there was no screaming now and there were no guns; he was alone in an empty house, and there was still a war ongoing, the great war for the spirit trapped inside him. He felt like a passive observer, like there was nothing he could do. Only endure it. .

He was there for some time. Hunger began to prick at him. He endured it. He was not used to hunger, but he could withstand it, and he did not know to fear it. And even if he had known to fear it, he would never have cause to do so. There were flickering wires and bits of functionality inside him that ensured he'd always take care of himself just enough: procure food, clothes, shelter, in the event of an unforeseen circumstance. His keepers had programmed him well.

So all the hunger did was sharpen him. It pushed him past the fear and confusion. He now had something more than Bucky Barnes to focus on. He was able to uncurl and step towards the mirror. He examined the person there more closely. The eyes were pleasingly blank. Nothing strange and worrying there. No, now they were a little searching. But they still did not feel like his own eyes; they still seemed to belong to someone else. He really hadn't known he had eyes. He might have been a gun, or a grenade launcher. He felt no connection to his body at all. If this body was Bucky Barnes, then Bucky Barnes was a chamber – _freezing cold_ whispered his mind – that he was trapped in. And Bucky Barnes was also the sharp shredding of his reality, the overwhelming fear he was being subjected to.

He determined, in short time, that he was the soul. Him. With his orderly metal arm – Bucky Barnes supplied the fingers closing in around someone's throat; but he flinched away from the memory – and his sure knowledge of so many things, and his – his _orders_. Up until now he had had orders. Nothing more. But now he'd awoken to discover that he was trapped inside a metal man the whole time. He was now permanently affixed to an identity, to Bucky Barnes. Attacked over and over again by it.

Almost everything about him – the inside and the outside – was given over to Bucky Barnes. He did not belong to himself. He never had, but before he had at least been nothing, no one, comfortably blank. But Captain America had a codeword, a trigger, _Bucky_, like he'd loved this identity, like it had meaning and like he meant to make the No Man, the Metal Man, the _asset_ a victim of it.

Steve Rogers had put him here. He'd planted him inside this torture chamber: self. As though to reanimate a man who by all rights should have stayed dead.

And then he'd left him here. He hadn't killed him. He hadn't done _anything_. He'd simply lain there, bruised and bloody, and forced up a recollection of a smaller man doing much the same thing, lying broken but defiant. And this image had twisted something inside the Winter Soldier, until he'd acted almost without meaning to, until he'd performed a new role. Not the role of a blank asset. But the role of Bucky Barnes, protector and friend.

The Winter Soldier was not him. He did not want to be him. It was strange to discover that he had wants, strange and terrible. But they were not exactly wants. They were not-wants. The first stumbling step to genuine wants. He had three not-wants, and here they were:

1. He did not want to be Bucky Barnes.  
2. He did not want to be HYDRA's.  
3. He did not want to _be_. Or at least, not like this. He could never go back to two clean human hands, to the mundane business of selecting ties, to peering over at a small Steve Rogers in an alleyway. But he could end the assault. There was a way. Wasn't there?

This was his new order. To end the attack on himself.

He'd given himself an order.

This was misbehavior on his part. And he not only knew that it was wrong, he understood it, as well. But as he watched himself in the mirror, a smile crept in. It did not make his mouth quirk handsomely, like Bucky Barnes with the right tie and brylcreemed hair and a starched collar and the perfect new suit. It only spread out in a hesitant way. Exploring. New. A little disturbing.

He thought about torture devices, other selves like insidious poisons. What could you do if you were trapped in a cycle of pain and torture? Defend? But defenses made no sense to him. He'd been an offensive onslaught himself for seventy-odd years, though he wasn't quite aware of it. And he'd never once seen someone successfully defend. Not against him, anyway. Not until Steve Rogers.

No, there could be no defending against the memories, the rush of horrible feeling.

No. He had to die, probably. That was the only other out. Death.

He looked at himself hungrily in the mirror. He wanted that. His torturer – Steve Rogers – owed him that. He had opened him up and exposed him to life and then _left_ him, fallen down, down, down. And the Soldier, like an imbecile, had pulled him to the banks and then walked away, too confused and new to realize that his only cure could come at the hands the man who'd infected him in the first place.

But he had grown. He had something like his own wants now. He had hunger. He had an iron stubbornness inside him that triggered all his abilities, that led him to crush men's necks on toy buses in broad daylight. He stared at the face in the mirror, put his hands to its cheeks, started in surprise at how cold the metal one was. He was not afraid of it. He had orders now. He'd grown enough to give himself orders.

He would go in search of his own torture machine, his own end, to get below the skin of him, as Steve Rogers' words had. Something to wipe him out completely. _Him_. The Not Man. Not just Bucky Barnes. He was trapped in the shell of Bucky Barnes; they'd wiped him, and he'd still awoken to the same flesh-and-metal chamber, still remained vulnerable to Steve Rogers.

That was no way to live. This time all of him had to go. He had grown enough to realize that this was the only way.

It did not occur to him to just end his own life, surely the simplest means to this end. It did not occur to him that he _could_, even though the knowledge of his capabilities was filed away inside him, and even though HYDRA had installed several mechanisms and maneuvers in him expressly for moments like these. He was supposed to turn himself in. He was supposed to use his arm to disable himself, to turn himself _off_. He was supposed to, in a worst case scenario (and two dead HYDRA agents later, he was approaching a worst case scenario), simply kill himself.

But something in him simply didn't consider it. Bucky Barnes in his veins, making him irrational, overloading his system, and disabling all kinds of commands. A poisonous override. But also a kind of growth, and healing.

But still he remembered being held down.

In all the memories crawling through him like soldiers on their bellies in the mud, ready to mount another offensive, being held down was surprisingly common. Being held down and then trapped. Metal closing in. The old cold prison. Waking and pleading and being held down again.

He remembered, also, holding other people down. Women. Children. Men with soft eyes who begged him to let them go. These recollections caused inexplicable queasiness, itself a later stage in the same old attack.

After he had stolen some food from a nearby house things became worse, because he lost the edge of hunger. But he retained his purpose: to find Steve Rogers and demand his own overpowering poison torture, his own end. There was no way to control the emotions and images inside him, and this would not do. He dreamed – if something like him could be said to dream – of simply snuffing them out.

But he wanted to make the choice to snuff them out _himself_. He did not want HYDRA to do it. He was not HYDRA. He knew this now. And he did not want HYDRA to have control over his end. He wanted that control for himself. He wanted it because, if anyone was going to strike him down and end him, it would be at his urging, it would be _his_ mission.

He felt perverse, disobedient, in thinking this. But he did not care. The poison in his veins made him reckless.

He stole a car the same way he'd stolen the food. Simply because he knew how, his body knew how, and the task was like breathing, really. Thinking very hard about it only made it a chore; doing it on instinct was better. He hadn't made it very far to Steve Rogers's apartment when a police car came up next to him, and he knew he could outrun it, but that would have been pointless.

If you cut off one head, more grew back in its place.

The policeman who came out looked like an ex-marine, and his uniform was wrong, and his gun was a Magpul FMG-9, which was also wrong.

The Winter Soldier held him down when he killed him, beyond the sight of the road. He did it purely to see what the sensation was like, to compare it to his memories, not quite understanding why this was important. He put the metal hand over the man's eyes and nose and pressed and held and held while his human hand worked with the knife. He thought about cold metal torture chambers closing in. On some level, he wanted to recreate that. He still couldn't connect to Bucky Barnes, but if he could replicate what had happened to him, possibly he would understand things better, and he wouldn't feel so overwhelmed. He remembered fear at the metal chamber, at being strapped into it. But through a haze of time and maturity and what was rapidly developing into a very dark sense of humor, he could conclude that the experience hadn't been so bad, really. There were worse things.

Though it felt very different when you were playing the role of the metal chamber yourself, and someone else's identity was bleeding out underneath you.

He got back in the car. Made it to the highway. He had to pull over a few more times, though. He did remember targeting the apartment (or at least he thought it had been Captain America's apartment). But he was still all cut up. Bucky Barnes was inside him like a poison, showing him cheap wood frame houses, a city skyline, a river, two bridges. A place that, like Bucky, really didn't exist anymore.

So if he didn't concentrate hard, for whole stretches he would just forget where Captain America lived. It was very annoying.

Then, of course, when he reached the apartment it was empty. It had nothing but dead and useless things in it, things that had nothing to do with Steve Rogers. Shiny kitchen appliances. Discarded piles of books. One formal suit hanging forlornly in the bedroom. Clean white sheets in the hall closet. Shoes lined up, unused, a row of shining leather. Expensive unopened colognes and a half-used packet of floss. Nothing that had any meaning, really. All things Steve Rogers could have left behind.

(And in fact had left behind.)

Bucky, that toxin that had infected the Winter Soldier, now showed him this:

A building framed in wood, dun brown bricks in between. A cramped three-room apartment. A board to throw on the tub to make a kitchen counter. Two nails near the door. A narrow cot. Green curtains. Foreign letters on an awning. A woman doing up her hair on the stair. The river and the city just beyond the buildings across the way. Green peeling wallpaper with yellow cabbage roses. Sailors on the stoop. Dirt in the bricks. An old lady slowly, slowly coming down steps. Someone just out of sight.

_Bucky_, they called.

He took in one deep, panicked breath and slid down the length of the wall.

Another assault.

But that wasn't the worst of it. The worst of it was: something was missing at the heart of those memories. Something was gone.

Someone cleared their throat.

Without even thinking, the Winter Soldier was up. He had him. He _had_ him. Pinned him to the wooden floor, knife at his throat, and it was—

Not Steve Rogers. Another man. His face was familiar. But from where? The Winter Soldier touched it with one metal finger, and it rippled. The man laughed. He said, "Something tells me you're looking for a friend."


	7. Chapter 7

Five days after they left Dr. Stern with Sharon Carter and reported the dead body to – well, some government authority, though Steve was clearly making up the rules about which one as he went along – Steve was in New York.

They had the second doctor – Dr. Brown, lately of New York – to follow up on. They had received a terse phone call from Natasha requesting Steve's presence in New York for an unspecified reason. And Sam still had people who needed him down at the VA. He'd been ready to drop everything and help Steve when it had seemed the Winter Soldier was heading out of DC. But the Winter Soldier had stayed. And as long as Sam needed to be on hand in the District in case the Soldier got out of hand, he figured there was no point in ditching his job.

So it made sense: Steve in New York and Sam in DC.

Steve hadn't seemed to want to go. Sam hadn't wanted him to. There wasn't much more to say about it beyond that. Steve was shockingly unromantic whenever romance collided with duty. He never seemed to have picked up whatever programming made romance the very first priority. And when Steve asked if it was alright – for him to be in New York, and Sam to be in DC, when for all intents and purposes they were in the process of figuring out whether they should be in the same place, whether they should be exclusive, whether that would interfere with things, whether being a couple was what they wanted – Sam had said, straightforward, "Someone's got to go help Natasha. And someone's got to stay here to make sure your guy doesn't attack a cab company."

So he was fine with it.

Now Steve was on his way to meet Natasha. She'd given him her new address; only it was not an address. It was a construction zone.

There had been a hospital there once. Steve remembered it vividly. The metal beds, the sickly yellow light, the starched white and blue nurses' uniforms, the taste-free food, the pricks of every needle, the _boredom_ of the place. His mother crossing Atlantic Avenue to get to it, seeing her exhausted face light up when she looked at him, as bright as the neon sign on the butcher's establishment that had used to sit right across the avenue. But the old hospital had come down sometime in the 50s or 60s, and now the building that had replaced it had come down as well, and what Steve found now was a sort of gaping maw, a huge hole where his life's story used to be. Cranes shoveled dirt out of it and men set up steel girders, and a sign nearby said that Gilgamesh Equities Luxury Condominiums would be coming by to fill the hole in, in about eight months.

"You know," Steve said, when he felt a presence at his elbow, "There's a reason I don't live in Brooklyn these days."

"The rent is too damn high," Natasha agreed.

He'd missed her. He'd wanted to talk to her. To her. Not to a phone that wired him to her. It wasn't anything wrong with the phone – Steve was not, contrary to popular belief, a Luddite. He liked phones. Liked all technology well enough, really: tablets and computers and vision-correcting electronic magnifiers and life-saving breathing machines and those moving chairs by the sides of stairwells for people who couldn't walk. Years ago, the fear had been that machines would somehow sap away all humanity. It had seemed very real then. The Nazis came hand in hand with brutally efficient little cars and factory jobs for everyone they deemed human. There were plays and films about it – machine people, cold people, robots both vicious and economical, designed to lead men astray.

But no one seemed to have gone very far. As far as Steve could tell, technology represented the same promise of life-saving advancement and deadly mechanized killing that it always had. People even had the same complaints about it. Cell phones were called 'alienating,' texting was accused of eroding common human sympathy. But then people had said the same thing years ago, when texting didn't exist and the only phones available to most were in booths at the corner store that cost too much.

Some things were better now. But overall they hadn't changed. And what had changed – like HYDRA getting its claws into the nation – couldn't be blamed on telephones. It was probably, more likely, the nation's fault. Because the helicarriers had been a problem. But without people to design and approve and man them, people believing themselves accountable to no one, they wouldn't have been anything but hunks of metal.

So it was nothing against the phone. The phone was fine. But the phone could not be a stand-in for Natasha. The phone was a small flat box that projected whatever Steve desired, nothing more, smooth and featureless and full of mysterious data cards and wires, lighting up on command, an app for every occasion. And, up until a short while ago, Natasha had been a small and flat (admittedly beautiful, but still flat, in a sense, still too perfectly fitted to every situation) woman. A very smooth one, carrying out mysterious orders, not inherently artificial or cruelly false or anything like that, but simply robotic in her adaptability. A phone made a decent stand-in for someone like that.

But not for _Natasha_.

She and Agent Hill had gone up before Congress to speak for them all. Congress had a good reason to call in Agent Hill. People had seen her entering the Triskelion, techs could testify that she'd commandeered their workroom. But the only thing tying Natasha to the whole affair was Alexander Pierce's claim that she'd infiltrated his office minutes before his death. And Pierce had obviously lied about a lot of things, so that wasn't much to go on. Natasha had more reason to blow off the hearings than anyone. But she hadn't.

Steve, by contrast, should have shown up. He was pretty unmistakably one of the people who had taken down the helicarriers. But he really hadn't had much to say.

It looked like he thought he was too good to hold himself accountable to the American people. He could see that, now. He could see that mostly because Natasha had thrown that attitude on like a new coat, and made it very very clear to him.

"You know, I saw you on the computer. You have a way of making a guy feel like a jerk," Steve said, staring down at the construction pit. Men in hard hats tossed old cement masonry into a huge garbage bin.

"I really can't have people thinking you're too perfect," Natasha said. "You ever dealt with a perfect person, Rogers?"

"Yes," Steve said truthfully. He thought of Bucky, who hadn't been perfect but whose flaws had mostly been the well-meaning kind. And Sam, who had small and silly pet peeves, no great interest in self-preservation, a kind of rebel crackle to him that his calm demeanor couldn't fully hide.

"Well, there's nowhere to go but down for them," Natasha told him frankly. Which, at least in Bucky's case, seemed horribly appropriate.

"Anyway," Natasha continued. "There's nothing wrong with people thinking they've spotted your flaw."

"When they haven't?" Steve guessed.

"Sure," said Natasha. "I mean, do you really think you're exceptional? Above the long arm of Congress?"

He. Well. He didn't think he was _exceptional_. And he didn't want to be above anyone, like SHIELD had been. And he was sure he'd have something to report to Congress a few months from now, when things got really official, if in fact aliens or undercover HYDRA sleeper agents didn't attack in the meantime, requiring his urgent attention.

"Not really," Steve said.

"That's stupid," Natasha said. "I think _I_ am. Come on."

She led him around the pit to a building, a marble column portico building, five stories with geraniums in the windowboxes and a landmark designation in front. A sign on the door said that the back entrance was the Museum of Curiosities of Kings County, and that a Waldorf school would be opening at the front entrance soon. But it hadn't been built to house a school or a museum.

"This was medical records," Steve said, squinting at it. His frequent bouts of childhood illness – pneumonia and influenza and coronary trouble and nervousness and ten million others, that he really preferred to leave buried in the past – had meant that for much of his childhood he'd never made it into medical records. His records had mostly bounced from ward to ward, growing in size each time. But then his health had calmed down as he'd grown older. He'd been relegated to medical records by the time he was fifteen, doubtlessly the most extraordinary medical record in the place by virtue of having made it to fifteen in spite of all his health problems.

Natasha took him in through the side door, up several flights of stairs, to the museum. The stairs were cold drafty metal. There was a sign on the metal door at the top. It said: WE ARE NOT CLOSING. THANKS TO YOUR PRESERVATION EFFORTS, WE ARE MOVING TO 1138 CONEY ISLAND AVENUE AFTER THE THIRD. WE WILL REOPEN ON THE SIXTEENTH. It was written in green Sharpie.

The door opened onto what should have been the top floor office. But it wasn't. The secretaries' wooden cubicle was gone, so were the heavy Victorian curtains and the hard metal chairs and the framed portrait of Fiorello Laguardia. There was a stuffed raccoon in the corner, a bulletin board with a collection of gory crime photographs, a glass case with rusted trolley parts, a collection of books that all had to do with the Malbone Street Wreck of 1918, a graffiti-covered subway door, a large photo of several famous rappers, and a bored young man sitting behind a scratched desk with a water cooler on it. He wore an old t-shirt and dress pants. He had sunglasses on. He appeared to be sleeping.

Natasha rapped hard on the desk. He shot upright, his mouth twisting in an annoyed grimace. He said, "Oh shit," when he saw Steve.

"That's not a greeting I hear often," Steve said.

"Don't worry," Natasha assured him. "It gets much more common once you topple your first government agency." Then she looked down at the young man and said, "Hi. He wants his file. Talk to us about patient confidentiality, too."

And, looking terrified, the young man stood up and beckoned at them. He led them went through a door in the back, down a long dark hall, and then down some stairs, though several heavily locked doors. When they emerged, they were in a cool, high-ceilinged basement.

Someone had moved the medical records file cabinets down here.

All the while the young man was stammering out that the museum had of course not meant to intrude, but after a certain amount of time the hospital had wanted to burn Steve's records. Well, Steve's records were of great historical importance. They couldn't possibly have allowed that. Mr. Stark – that is, Howard, the man who had bankrolled the museum – had intervened. And they'd saved the records, and that was that, and no one had asked about them for years. And they weren't exactly on exhibit, they were more of a special hidden treasure, for years they'd been on hand only for people who were pre-approved—

"People want to look at my medical records?" Steve said blankly.

"Not that many people," the young man said, in a convincing kind of way. "You were really just a historical footnote until the battle of New York. Like almost forgotten. I mean, I didn't even know you existed; I never took AP US history or anything."

Steve stared at the young man. He started to look ashamed of himself. He opened his mouth to stammer out an apology.

"Son," Natasha said, like she was enjoying herself a little too much, "Just _don't_."

Steve glared at her. She ignored him. She said, "What do you think will happen if anyone finds out we we're here?"

"Captain America will probably have to take legal action?" said the young man, looking miserable. "Because…we. It's not exactly legal. Though it is transparent! You like transparency, don't you?" he asked Steve hopefully.

Steve just stared at him again.

"Right," said the young man. "I'll let myself out. I won't. I won't talk."

"Great, thanks," Natasha said, almost too casually, and then she held her hands out at all the records when the young man had gone. "He may not," she said, "But breaking into this place is harder than you think, since the property's swarming with developers all around, and I don't have the time for it right now."

"Why do I feel like you're going to ask me to look for myself?" Steve said.

"I have nothing against a spiritual journey, but maybe save it for when I'm not here," Natasha said. "We're not looking for you. We're looking for whoever was looking for you. You would be a good place to start, though, I guess."

Steve stared at her. She gestured at a box of records. He took it, stared at it. Brooklyn Local History, Summer 1965. Natasha waved her hand at him, suggesting that he throw it in the corner. He did.

"There's an agent," Natasha said, rooting around. "Her name's Alison Pearl."

Steve sifted through boxes and cabinets. They seemed to be in the 60s and 70s. He stepped back, took stock of the wall of files in front of him, and moved towards where the dates grew more familiar. '45, '44, and so on. But Natasha moved in the opposite direction.

"Alison Pearl?" Steve called after her. "Stern evaluated her, I think."

"I know. Don't shout," Natasha said, sifting through the files on her end. So Steve went over to her. She was checking in the smaller cabinets, discarding each one after a cursory look, like she knew exactly where her quarry was, and would recognize it when she saw it.

"Pearl was in deep cover," Natasha said. "With a macabre terrorist ring operating out of Russia and Northern Europe - the Isdal Ring. I trained her for the mission myself. When her cover was blown, she should have gone to a safehouse we set up – not we, SHIELD; we, me, because I have a couple boltholes and I'd let her know about this one. It wouldn't have been glamorous, but it would have tided her over for a week or two. I had contacts who could have helped her. They said she wasn't there. She never showed up."

Steve blinked.

"I'm sorry—" he began.

"Don't be," said Natasha. "She's fine. She made it to London after her cover was blown, and reported to Agent Hill right away."

"But something's off," Steve guessed.

"The Isdal ring erases people who cross them," Natasha said. "They leave them unidentifiable—that's their calling card, it's why they call themselves that—and anyone caught out by them needs to get out right away, or three things happen: they burn off identifying facial features, they burn off fingerprints, and then they leave the body somewhere for people to find and wonder about. Pearl came back and said they'd tried to do this to her – her face showed signs of healing from scarring, like she'd been in a struggle and had gotten away."

"So?" Steve said. "Maybe she was in a struggle and she got away."

"They do the fingerprints first," Natasha said. "One by one. To make it hurt more."

"Her fingerprints were intact?" Steve said. "That seems like a liability in the spy business, sure."

Natasha gave him a plainly unimpressed look. She said, "Two things don't add up. One – how fast she got out, no need for a safehouse. I've had my cover blown in similar circumstances. Trust me, it helps to have a place to recuperate, and this one would have been perfect, but she didn't need to use it."

"She had contacts of her own?" Steve guessed.

"Right," said Natasha, "But who?"

HYDRA. Possibly.

"And the second thing," Natasha said, "Is how old the scarring seemed, and how Agent Hill said it went away completely in a week, and how her hands and fingers seemed fine."

"Maybe they didn't catch her," Steve offered. "They just didn't—"

They were in the 2000s now. Natasha picked through the files shelved in that decade. She said, "That's what I can't figure out. If they didn't catch her, why tell us they did?"

"Maybe she's scared to be sent back," Steve said.

"Right," said Natasha. "So is she a scared agent? Or a HYDRA operative with super healing, who slipped up? And if they could heal her that quickly, where do you think they got the idea and the initia—oh! Here it is."

And there it was. Steve didn't quite follow her reasoning, but he took the file anyway. Rogers, Steven G., fat and ancient and yellowed and familiar. He opened it. A slightly less yellowed paper had been affixed to the front, reminiscent of a library slip. It indicated that the file could be dug up for perusal and copying, but it could go no further than museum. And the list of people who had asked to see it went on for almost the whole page.

Phil Coulson had taken a look, a few years ago. When Steve had been coming out of the ice. Probably, Steve realized, because Nick Fury had wanted to know what they were getting into with him.

"This isn't just because of his lifetime, uh, passion," Steve said. "For me."

"Not just," said Natasha. "He did personally volunteer to help put together your profile, though."

Bruce had seen this, too. Bruce.

"Why is he—" Steve began.

"Serum," Natasha said.

Ah. Right.

But then there was a long long list of names Steve didn't recognize. Natasha said some had to be with historical societies, maybe, and some had to be curiosity seekers.

"There's nothing here," Steve said.

"Right," Natasha said, holding up another file. "Yours is useless, which I suspected anyway. His, on the other hand—"

And then she had another file, another medical history that should have been destroyed. It was much, much slimmer than Steve's. It listed several perfect checkups and analyses. Only one illness was detected—childhood measles. It had lasted a week, and been roundly defeated.

Bucky had always been very healthy.

Natasha hadn't brought bring Steve here for his file. That was just the cover. That was what the museum employee would spread around if anyone asked; that was what anyone who might be interested in these moldering old files would be concerned with. Steve. Captain America. But they weren't here for Steve. They were here for Bucky.

"Does this look familiar?" Natasha asked, pointing at the last instance of handwriting on Bucky's yellow slip.

It did. Though Steve couldn't place it immediately. The name was signed a little too artfully. It was a little too messy to make out as anything. Probably deliberately. But under _Reason for Your Interest_ the handwriting was much clearer. It said, _Sergeant Barnes has long been a personal hero._

Given the kind of guy Rumlow was, Steve really doubted that.


End file.
